Mailnews Exchange Support: basic mail infrastructure

This post is intended mostly as a status update on my effort to add Microsoft Exchange Server support to the Mozilla mailnews products, including Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.

In my last report, I was testing and updating the old Mozilla SOAP framework for use in communicating with Exchange Web Services (EWS). Using the framework in a Thunderbird 3.0 environment, I could talk to the BING search SOAP interface. It took a couple of more weeks to resolve issues associated with communicating with EWS. There were a number of features missing from the old Mozilla SOAP, most importantly:

attributes in SOAP elements. [...]

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My uber-cautious checkin procedure

Since I see that checkin errors are fairly common, and a poorly controlled source of potential issues in Mozilla code, I developed my own written process that I follow whenever I do checkins. It’s probably over cautious, with a practice checkin locally before I do the real thing, but here it is in case anyone else is interested. This is my actual text, with little massaging for general audiences:

==== Check tinderbox for current checkin status and burns

(cd pristine/src) [This is a directory containing a clone of comm-central from mozilla] hg pull –u

(cd mozpush/src) [This is a directory [...]

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Toward mailnews Exchange Web Services support: SOAP calls

I’ve embarked on an effort to investigate adding support for Exchange server to the mailnews code. Although Exchange in Windows has traditionally used port 135-based protocols, my understanding is that the future for them is SOAP-based Exchange Web Services (EWS). As a first step, I wanted to get a basic SOAP library working in current mailnews code.

I considered a variety of approaches to this. One extension “Asertiva Thunderbird Extension for Sugar” uses the IBM/Prototype js library for SOAP access. Others recommended that I consider one of the open source SOAP libraries, such as a python-based library, or Apache’s AXIS2 [...]

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QA -> Developers communication

A few weeks ago on IRC dmose and I discussed the general issue of how QA communicates priorities to developers. I’d like to hear some comments on that from others, and possibly participate in some sort of trial of improvements.

The issue here is that I see lots of good work going on by people who are mostly involved in QA, such as wsmwk, WADA, and Ludo, but I as a developer don’t really know how to make the best use of that work.

I assume there is supposed to be a waterfall here, from (bug reporter)->(QA)->(developer)->(code reviewer)->(bug landing). I [...]

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FiltaQuilla 1.0.0 released, adds custom search terms

Well I finally decided to quit adding new stuff, and just get a compatible FiltaQuilla out the door that works with Thunderbird 3.0 and SeaMonkey 2.0. You can get the new version from Mozilla’s download site here.

In addition to some new filter actions (print, add sender to address list, and save attachments to a folder) this release introduces “custom search terms” for the first time. This is a new feature that has been added recently to the mailnews core code, and is part of the TB 3.0 and SM 2.0 releases.

The search I am talking about is the [...]

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Extension driven development

What then do I mean by “extension driven development”? It is the concept of changing the way that Thunderbird is developed and distributed, with a bare minimum set of core code, and the main features presented as a set of extensions, shipped with the product,  that can be enabled or disabled by users.

I don’t have any illusions that this has a significant chance of being implemented, and I’m not even sure it’s a good idea myself. But I ask you to suspend disbelief for a minute, and imagine a change to the development culture and process.

An email client [...]

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JunQuilla version 1.0.0 released

Today I released a version of JunQuilla that supports SeaMonkey 2.0, and the latest versions of Thunderbird including the upcoming 3.0RC1 and 3.0.0 The new version can be downloaded from the AMO site here. I’ve also submitted this version for review so that it can get out of experimental status.

JunQuilla is my attempt to extend the user interface in the Mozilla mailnews product to provide the information that I believe is needed to properly manage the bayesian junk filter. I suppose that most of these features should really be in the core product, but I found that support for [...]

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Inherited Folder Properties – revisited

In a previous posting, I introduced the concept of inherited folder properties in the Mozilla mailnews products (Thunderbird and SeaMonkey). In the months since, I have incorporated these into my extensions quite significantly, so here I would like to show the UI I am currently using for this, and also discuss some of the issues that I face.

(All references to extensions in this posting refer to the 1.0.0 versions, which as of this writing have not been posted to AMO yet. But they should be available in a few weeks.)

Implemented UI

Briefly, inherited properties are a property that [...]

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Managing spam with “after classification” filters

Nightly builds after 2009-08-19 of Thunderbird (or upcoming 3.0 beta 4) and SeaMonkey  (or upcoming 2.0 beta 2) include a new ability to apply message filters after the internal spam filter has classified the message. Previously, filtering was always done before spam classification, which meant that you could not use any results of the spam classification in a filter.

The default spam processing that is available without using filters (whitelisting, move or delete messages with a sufficiently high threshold) should be sufficient for most users. But for people with special requirements you can now implement those requirements in a filter [...]

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Filtering changes for Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3

It’s been a long time since I posted a blog, being busy with things I wanted to get into Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 (and Seamonkey 2.0 beta 1). Now that we enter the dark days of the freeze prior to the release, I have some time to update extensions to use new features available in beta 3. But I’d like to give details first of changes in the backend areas where I am working, starting with email filtering in this post.

So here are things that are new in Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 (Seamonkey 2.0 beta 1) that involve message [...]

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