Reading the Body (Mailnews Exchange Support)
June 4, 2010 – 2:58 pmJust as a status update, my Exchange Server extension can now read message bodies. But note that there is no header information displayed with the message:
Why no header information? Because the header summary, for reasons that I cannot explain, reads the message file directly – and assumes that the message is in RFC 2822 format. But Exchange Server has already done all of that parsing, and separated the message into its components, including metadata (like subject), body, and attachments.
An important issue going forward for the Mozilla Mailnews (Skink) codebase is, what exactly is the thingy that Thunderbird purports to be? Is it a processor of RFC 2822 messages? Or is it something more, that easily incorporates other forms of communications? I hope to write a longer post on that issue soon.
Even I have no idea what Thunderbird is ultimately about. I once thought it wanted to be more than a mail reader, but seeing news and feed support de-emphasized and improvements there not seen as worthy of investing time, seeing editor as being not welcome to be developed further, and not seeing any work for any new messaging support, I’m not sure any more where it’s heading. With Firefox folks telling me anything outside the web is dead and email very old-skool and ultimately doomed, I wonder if there’s any future for Thunderbird at all.
Sorry to paint doomsday scenarios here, but I’m missing the vision of the project.
I know that shoots somewhat off-topic here but perhaps it’s something to think about for that upcoming post of yours.
(And note that I don’t want to offend anyone but bring people to think with somewhat bold statements.)
You’re not at all off topic. Vision is something that is sorely lacking in Thunderbird at the moment, and the next few months are absolutely critical. With 3.1 hopefully being the fix for the problems of 3.0, there will be a time when the MoMo team gets their second wind, and starts to envision where they are going. I’ve considered doing a series of blog postings (or tb-planning, m.d.a.t, or whatever) to try to influence that, but it is not clear that my influence is likely to be have any real effect.
What sort of effect they will have depends in very large part on what they say, so it’s quite difficult to predict that in advance. That said, your blogging so far has generally be interesting, useful, and thought-provoking.
I hope to hear vision on direction from you and David Ascher in the near future, as any direction that you provide will be so much more effective than anything I could do.
You will. I’ve been working on putting together a draft Thunderbird charter to start nailing down what exactly it is we’re trying to do here. I expect to post an initial version of that for feedback and iteration in the coming weeks.
BTW, I just happened to notice your comment because this page re-loaded in my browser. Since I submitted my email address with each comment, I would have expected to get an email notifying me of your reply, but I didn’t. Is that an intentional setting in your WordPress account? Or should I be suspecting that it was sent and a spam filter somewhere ate it?
I needed to add a plugin to activate that feature, which I have now done. Thanks for pointing this out.