Curse

Welcome to another World of Warcraft add-on spotlight! In this issue we are covering Inbox Mailbag, by Brefin.

The Addon 

Do you have a lot of incoming mail? Finding it hard to keep track of the items you're receiving? Then you might want to take a look at Inbox Mailbag!

Inbox Mailbag provides a completely new view of your inbox, fully dedicated to managing incoming items. For this purpose, it collects the items from all arriving mail and displays them on a grid - looking much alike a standard item bag. This grid can be found at a new "Bag" tab which the plugin appends to the inbox. 

This makes the addon a perfect solution for anyone who happens to have a crowded mailbox. For instance, if you are an auction house professional, it will be a terrific help for managing your deals. If you have a "bank alt" character, sending and receiving items will be much simpler.

The Extras

On top of all these features, Inbox Mailbag also finds the same items from different attachments and collates them into single stacks. This way, the item list is always the most concise possible. For making your life even easier, it provides a search bar which allows you to filter the items by name. Mousing over any item will provide additional information, such as who sent it and when it expires.

And you know what? There's no need for configuration! You can easily add it to your game by using the Curse Client, and you're ready to go.

Interview

We also had the opportunity to have a chat with the add-on's author, Brefin:

What inspired you to start Inbox Mailbag?

My Main, Krakhorn, is a Feral druid. He had a little bag space after Cataclysm, but this got consumed during leveling. Mists of Pandaria has a number of new toys and then a ton of cooking supplies. I had no place to put it. My inventory was full, my bank was full, and I started bouncing the cooking materials around between characters so that I would end up with stacks of materials sitting in mail messages in my inbox. I just wanted easier access to finding the materials I wanted.

Approximately how long did it take to finish the first working version?

 I had already been patching the addon I use for auction purposes, so I was familiar with some of the Mail UI. The addon itself, once I began working on it, came together a lot faster than I had expected. About a week or two.

In which situations do you find it to be most useful?

 I'm not cooking as much as I used to, but that's still how I use it. Scan through my mailbox to see if I have the items I need. Though I did like a user's note on using Inbox Mailbag with those auction house sellers who sell say... ore, in stacks of one each.

How was the experience of working with the World of Warcraft UI?

 It took a bit of going back and forth through their frame descriptions and supporting code. But I find it remarkably elegant.

Did you come across any problems during development? How did you handle them?

I admit getting the addon properly setup in a repository on CurseForge was one of the toughest spots. I didn't get the file hierarchy right at first. Thank you again to lebanoncyberspace for the pointer there. I rather suspected I had missed something on my end, but wasn't able to put my finger on the specifics

There was also the interaction with the Sent Mail addon's tab on the mailbox. Unfortunately while Blizzard provides tabs in the UI, they aren't really a shared resource. They are not easy to integrate with. Inbox Mailbag now explicitly tries to check for Sent Mail and adapt, but it does mean it is real easy for things to break there in the future. If there are any other mailbox addons with their own tab on the inbox, please let me know, so I can try and adapt to those as well.

Have you learned anything new from this project?

 Quite a bit about the Warcraft UI, Lua, and CurseForge.

Any plans for new addons in the future?

Right now the biggest thing bothering me id I keep missing who's on what channel when I log in or have been AFK. But I haven't yet been able to think of a good way to fit that into my overall UI.

Do you have any advice for potential new addon developers?

 All I can think of is to explore the usual suspects. Wowprogramming.com for its breakdown of Blizzard's APIs. The various lua resources. Even have a copy of Blizzard's own XML and lua files to peruse to see how they solve things. Especially if you plan on interacting with their systems.

Alas, we have come to the end of the interview, do you have any shout-outs?

 Once again a big thank you to Prata, lebanoncyberspace and my other early users for helping me polish and finesse things.

And thank you for your interest. I'm certainly glad to hear that other people are finding Inbox Mailbag useful as well.

No problem at all! Thank you to Brefin for answering our questions and developing this add-on!