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By rkent, on June 25th, 2010 My project to provide Exchange Web Services (EWS) support to applications based on the Mozilla mailnews codebase entered a new phase this week, where I am starting to consider the issue of local persistence of data downloaded from the server. (In the previous week, I got two other things working: display of HTML emails, and updating of UNREAD status from the local app to the server).
EWS messages do not come from the server in RFC-822 format, so it seems like a pity to store them that way, though that is the common method used in the rest of the [...]
By rkent, on June 16th, 2010 I received an email today asking that I add a feature to FiltaQuilla. Slightly edited, the author said:
Something I’ve found myself doing at work is creating a new filter for every folder I create. I work on technical cases and for each new case number I create a new folder and have all emails with that case number go into that folder. The crappy part about it is that I literally have hundreds of cases I deal with, and hence hundreds of filters. You’ve already got the regex match criteria in filtaqulla, I’d love to be able [...]
By rkent, on June 4th, 2010 Just 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 [...]
By rkent, on June 1st, 2010 During my current trek to the Bay Area, I seem to be bombarded with news about Google. I was particularly interested in the different way that Google views its business model, and that got me thinking about how Thunderbird fits into Mozilla’s business model.
In an extensive article in Atlantic magazine (I always read the Atlantic while travelling), James Fallow describes efforts that Google is undertaking to try to revive the viability of news reporting as a professional activity. A lot of this revolves around different methods of bundling content with monetization schemes. In the traditional newspaper model, news [...]
By rkent, on May 21st, 2010 Now that I have a state machine to handle situations that need multiple SOAP calls, it was not a big leap forward to hookup the SOAP requests to the mailnews summary database. That’s what gets the messages displayed in Thunderbird’s thread pane.
So here’s a picture to show where I am at. The two messages are real messages that exist on the Exchange server, and have been read by my extension. The message body is not real:
One problem that I had to solve is to make the nsMsgDatabase object extendable. The standard code for [...]
By rkent, on May 20th, 2010 I recently released a new version of FiltaQuilla for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, and one of its cool new features is a custom filter action that runs arbitrary JavaScript. This relies on new backend features, so you’ll need TB 3.1 beta2 or later for this to work.
Mitra recently pinged bug 249191 asking for a filter action that affects remote content. That looked like a good application of a javascript filter action, so I tried it out.
Looking at the underlying code in nsMsgContentPolicy.cpp, there is a message header property “remoteContentPolicy” that can be used to enable showing of remote content [...]
By rkent, on April 21st, 2010 To ease my transition back into ews after getting my brain all wrapped around filters for awhile, I thought I would tackle something that is mostly internal to the mailnews code. So I took on the task of getting a basic custom Account Manager interface up for the exchange web services account type.
The account manager interface was apparently written by an ancient advanced intelligence (oops I mean here), that used mysterious technologies that are no longer understood by humankind. Renowned cybernetic archaeologist Joshua Cranmer has tried to unravel some of its mysteries, but that provided me more of a [...]
By rkent, on April 12th, 2010 I’ve just completed a two-week hiatus from my work on Exchange Web Services (EWS) integration project to focus on fixing a few filter issues in mailnews core (Thunderbird and SeaMonkey) prior to TB’s 3.1 feature freeze. I will now return to EWS as my primary focus. But before I do, I think it would be useful to give an overview of some big-picture issues in filter and traditional search (which are closely related), providing something resembling a roadmap but without any real commitment by anyone to move forward.
Mailnews Traditional Filter and Search – Big Issues for Enhancements 1. Integrate [...]
By rkent, on March 25th, 2010 I set a goal for myself a few weeks ago to perform a single vertical slice through my Mailnews Exchange Support project, focusing on displaying Microsoft Exchange folders in the Thunderbird folderpane. I have now filled in the missing glue from the architecture in my last post, and have my first display of Exchange Web Services (EWS) objects in the Thunderbird user interface.
The account “rkent@caspia.org” is an Exchange account, and is finding the standard first-level Exchange folders – including some like “Calendar” and “Contacts” that I suppose should be suppressed here, and shown instead in their correct location in [...]
By rkent, on March 16th, 2010 In the last week, I realized that my Exchange integration project needed another layer in the architecture. Previously, I have discussed a layer that does SOAP calls, and a second layer that extends Mozilla mailnews objects. (Let me call the Mozilla-specific world of mailnews objects MMO “Mozilla mailnews objects” for short). I had thought that I would be able to glue these two layers together through a single method that would send and receive Exchange Web Services (EWS) messages, but that did not work out. The complexity of the data that is returned from EWS is too great to be [...]
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