It's extension is essentially ringtones for Thunderbird. I'm going to try use it for only a few special filters because I get so much mail in such large batches that it would probably drive me crazy if I set up more than a couple. But for those few cases where I really want to be able to distinguish incoming mail while I'm busy in the browser or elsewhere, this is going to rock!
update: An idea just came to me while talking with John about this extension. What if you assigned different notes of different durations to different people. You could employ a specific scale as a kind of pre-composition. The extension would also need to be able to record the email sound activity over a period of time and then play it back with the gaps between messages reduced to some range of rest durations. Then, at the end of the day you could then say to Thunderbird "play the 'music' from my email today."
We often talk about visualization tools for managing our information stream, but what about using sound, or even better, music! It certainly wouldn't have the same kind of value as visualization, but there could be something interesting there.
update2: Another idea. What if the extension knew to look in an email signature for a link to a "ringtone" on the web so that if you added someone to your addressbook, or if you created a filter from her message, Thunderbird would grab that sound resource and save a local copy of it. Then the sender could say "hey, if you're interested, this is how I'd like to sound to you in Thunderbird."
Just some ideas.
