Planet Mozilla Messaging

Six month ago, I shared our usage statistics for Lightning with you, which showed that Lightning users on Thunderbird 3.x had surpassed Lightning users on Thunderbird 2.x for the first time.

Now it's time to look at things again and I'm happy to report, that as of yesterday roughly 75% of our users now use a Thunderbird 3.x build as can be seen in the chart below.

It's also important to note that nearly 50% are already using the latest Thunderbird 3.1.x builds, while users of the old Thunderbird 3.0.x series are decreasing fast. This is mostly due to the major update offers of Mozilla Messaging for users of Thunderbird 3.0.x.

Major update offers have recently (last week) also started for users of Thunderbird 2.x, but haven't really been unthrottled yet (throttling means, that currently only 1 in 5 users of TB2 gets a major update offer to Thunderbird 3.1.x). Once major update offers go out to every TB2 user, we expect their numbers to decrease much more heavily. The current state of things (showing the last six months) can be seen in the chart below:

As frequently noted in earlier articles, the ratio of Thunderbird 3.0.x and TB 3.1.x users is much higher on the weekends compared to the Thunderbird 2 users. The graphs show that very well.

For those interested: The "other" number contains users on older Thunderbird 1.5.x builds, SeaMonkey users and users, who have mistakenly tried to install Lightning into Firefox. Generally that number always fluctuates between 0.35% and 0.5% of our total active users.

I hope that you will find this as interesting as I do.

September 02, 2010 08:09 AM

Tinderstatus 0.4 can notify you when a tree state changes, or even particular builds on a tree change state or stay broken:

I find this especially useful if I’m tree watching, as tinderstatus does the watching for you - you no longer need to keep examining tinderbox, or tbpl for the next build to change state, tinderstatus will do it for you, and push out an alert (using the gecko alerts system - on Mac this integrates with growl, as you’ll see above).

By right-clicking on Tinderstatus’ icons, you can globally turn on and off the notifications (for periods when you’re not watching the tree or its just too busy). You can also access the preferences where you can configure which trees to give notifications for, and which trees you want to get notifications in more detail about the specific builders.

I had the idea to implement this after seeing Christian’s pulse.mozilla.org and realising that I was doing a lot of context switching whilst watching the tree to keep looking at the web page. I realised a notification system would push the information to me rather than going to have to look (and maybe reload) a web page myself - what was even better is that I realised that although pulse.mozilla.org is still under development, I could easily add notifications to Tinderstatus. So I did.

I hope the tree watchers out there find this useful, improvements are always welcome, tinderstatus can be found on mozdev.

September 01, 2010 10:38 AM

A new branch of Trustedbird based on Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.2 has been released.

As for now, Trustedbird 3.1 implements only S/MIME signed receipts. This feature is described in Enhanced Security Services for S/MIME (RFC 2634 - section 2).

The client is able to request a receipt in a S/MIME signed message. It can also reply to a receipt request by sending a signed receipt.

Trustedbird 2 has also been upgraded and is now based on Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.24.

⇒ Signed receipts screenshots

⇒ More information about Trustedbird

--10:11, 1 September 2010 (CEST)

September 01, 2010 08:14 AM

• Releases:
  Finally released SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 this week, after spending a few hours on readying relnotes and the announcement.
  Shortly after that, I started off the release process for the 2.0.7 security update, which is now available in candidate builds and on the "beta" update channel.
• Build Machines:
  An issue with Windows L10n repacks turned out to be a conflict with pre-existing trees on the machines, I clobbered all boxes to fix it.
  I also investigated some missing L10n nightlies and should have a fix very soon now.
• Build System:
  The small packaging fixes reported last week could land, just like those for jsperf (covered by a test).
  Later in the week, I worked on and fixed the reporter removal and the new Addon Repository prefs.
  I also did some more investigation of building with libxul and filed bugs on S/MIME bustage and import linking failure with this enabled.
• Automated tests:
  The test I created based on some WIP code from Frank for the FAYT / Findbar focus issue was reviewed and I could land it so we should catch possible regressions there.
  I couldn't take much of a look into out test oranges, but some other people thankfully did and some are being fixed - but it looks like others are being added as well.
• Places:
  The rest of the first batches of Firefox backports of Neil's review comments have been reviewed, approved and landed, so we're one bug down on those. The bug for cleaning up the places library is probably up for a longer story, as the scope bar part might not live up to theming expectations yet.
  The fast bookmarking button went through some review and also is up for some backporting, I updated the SeaMonkey patch and hope to get this integrated soon. Building on that, I'd like to convert the editing panel in the browser to an arrow panel later on to make it feel more logical and fluid in usage.
  And on Mac, the places bookmarks stuff doesn't work when no windows open, which needed some fixes on the Mac-specific "hidden windows" that serves their window-independent menu in that case.
• Smaller Work:
  I don't feel for doing an own bullet point for each of them, so here's a few smaller items:
  I updated the doorhanger notifications patch once again for some review comments, I hope it finally gets somewhere.
  On the ongoing user agent discussions, I finally abandoned the utopia of getting clean as-they-should-be UA strings when Minefield decided to switch to a "Firefox" UA, taking away the majority of technically potent people testing the non-Firefox-branded Gecko web. Still, as I'm for doing things fully or not at all, I concluded no Gecko should be delivered without "Firefox" in the UA and filed a bug for an automation of that. This was WONTFIXED and I guess we'll stay where we are in the end, so we'll probably solve this on SeaMonkey with the UI pref and a default to "on" for now.
• Data Manager:
  Once again, I updated the Data Manager patch for recent review comments, of course only to trigger more of those never-ending review comments and a negative super-review based on a crash I can't investigate, reproduce or debug and which very probably isn't my fault or in my code. In the end, that might just be what will stall this feature indefinitely. I still filed a bug on correctly listing IDN.
• Themes:
  I updated my LCARStrek and EarlyBlue themes for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 on Sunday to not leave users of this milestone empty-handed when it comes to theming - though they now have personas as well, of course.
• German L10n:
  I created and updated a beta channel version of the German language pack for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3, so that people can test this release in German language as well if they like or need to.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, SeaMonkey build machines, work on final look for new addons manager, visit to Bay Area and Mozilla HQ, probable PPC end-of-line, status bar, etc.

August 31, 2010 08:09 PM

August 30, 2010 01:39 PM

Hi everyone,

it's really hard for me, but I've decided to resign from my different roles in The Calendar Project (mainly as webmaster and l10n contact) as of today (Monday).

Within the last six months it has become clear to me, that I'm not able to do the job adequately anymore, as my time has been more and more occupied with matters related to my private life and my day job. Therefore I've not been able to dedicate as much volunteer
time to this role as I would have liked or hoped.

I don't want to fill a role any longer, where I'm not satisfied with my performance and where a motivated person with more time on his/her hands could really make the difference, that I can't make anymore.

I'm currently working with Philipp, our lead developer, on a transition plan. Once a new person takes over, I'll make sure to be available and help him/her with ramping up in the new role. If anybody is interested in picking up some or all of this work, we (meaning Philipp or me) would love to talk to you.

I've written up a list of things, that I've performed regularly in this role to give people an impression of what's involved. The list is available here.

In my eyes, the Calendar Project is a project, where one person can really make a difference, unlike in large projects as Firefox, where the impact of one person is often just a drop in the sea. So please get in touch!

It's been a real pleasure working with all of you

PS: I will also resign from my role as Thunderbird l10n contact. Please see this blog post for more information.

August 30, 2010 01:19 PM

Previous Lightning release (1.0 Beta 2) | Next planned Lightning (1.0 beta 3?) | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central)

Common (excluding Website bugs): (25)

• Fixed: 341537 - Leaking factories/modules for some components
• Fixed: 357112 - Drag and drop of multiday-event doesn’t drop on days the shadow suggests
• Fixed: 402376 - Custom reminder dialog is hardly localizable
• Fixed: 412768 - Make use of calUtils.jsm’ |cal.getIOService()|
• Fixed: 463030 - Until date of recurrence rule can set before start date of event
• Fixed: 467908 - All day event boxes in rotated view overlapps time grid and shown side by side
• Fixed: 500916 - Access key conflict in menu “Events and Tasks”
• Fixed: 514226 - After 10pm local time, a new “All Day Event” covers two days
• Fixed: 532874 - Unable to add new events or tasks because units for alarm preferences are missing
• Fixed: 554722 - event/task creation fails if alarm unit preference contains an unexpected value [Exception "Cannot modify properties of a WrappedNative" in calAlarmUtils.jsm]
• Fixed: 563170 - Lightning 1.1a1pre broken, views remain empty – update to new addon manager API required
• Fixed: 566599 - Events in the agenda are not sorted according to the showed date
• Fixed: 568919 - Moving an event from a calendar to another may cause the loss or duplicity of the event.
• Fixed: 569572 - Events from eGroupware CalDAV resource are not displayed when program is started
• Fixed: 572076 - Adding the date to all-day events in “Soon” section of Today Pane
• Fixed: 576746 - Make calendar XPCOM components use new manifests and data tables
• Fixed: 577023 - The until date of a repeating event changes from UTC time to floating after Thunderbird is closed and restarted.
• Fixed: 583298 - Raise version numbers from 1.0b2pre
• Fixed: 585478 - Remove optional second argument to getChildList
• Fixed: 585717 - Adapt calDateTime.cpp to jsval changes
• Fixed: 586223 - Failed to load libcalbasecomps.so
• Fixed: 586641 - Update license blocks to use “Mozilla Foundation” instead of “Mozilla Messaging” (for Calendar)
• Fixed: 588869 - Replace <popup> with <menupopup>
• Fixed: 590292 - Crash at every startup of Mail with Lightning 1.1a1pre [@ calbasecomps.dll@0x1b42 ] (Windows) or [@ libcalbasecomps.so@0x60bd ] (Linux)
• Fixed: 590995 - Adapt to changes to nsIChannelEventSink

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-calendar1.0+): (88)

• Since 2004-04-29: 242112 - Make calendar keyboard accessible
• Since 2004-09-17: 260121 - Make datepicker and timepicker keyboard accessible
• Since 2004-11-17: 270501 - the list of events for the listbox (unifinder) is sorted three times
• Since 2004-12-05: 273279 - no visual status mark on tentative or cancelled events/tasks
• Since 2005-11-01: 314594 - No error message if invalid URL used for new calendar, creates invalid calendars
• Since 2005-11-10: 315959 - profile ICS calendar reading
• Since 2006-03-04: 329387 - Dismissed alarm behave erratically when event is moved
• Since 2006-03-20: 331112 - RFC description of WKST does not appear to be followed
• Since 2006-07-28: 346278 - Allow building localized lightning langpacks
• Since 2006-08-22: 349641 - Lightning asks for master password again
• Since 2006-08-22: 349673 - Alarm dialog shown for new events that are scheduled in the past
• Since 2006-09-30: 354935 - undo after moving a single occurrence does the wrong thing
• Since 2006-11-16: 360916 - Snoozed alarm fires at old event time although event time has been changed
• Since 2006-11-21: 361424 - month view day boxes should draw eventboxes in a batch
• Since 2007-01-06: 366139 - Wrong end time set on multi-day events
• Since 2007-01-16: 367131 - Allow click and drag event creation in time scale (hours column)
• Since 2007-03-02: 372424 - iTIP/iMIP invitation bar doesn’t disappear after changing e-mail folder
• Since 2007-03-08: 373251 - Can open multiple windows of a single event/task from Agenda, Task lists and Unifinder
• Since 2007-03-24: 375210 - Revisit alarm dialog dismissal/snooze user experience
• Since 2007-07-23: 389281 - Write to read-only ICS store creates event on screen
• Since 2007-07-31: 390293 - Event/task dialog does nothing upon “Save and close” when Thunderbird/Sunbird main window is closed
• Since 2007-08-29: 394195 - Dialogs need a scroll bar or minimum height/width
• Since 2007-09-08: 395504 - Allow to have localized default values for some preferences (lightning-l10n.js not shipped)
• Since 2007-09-24: 397323 - Invite Attendees dialog: cannot move/resize the splitter between attendees and grid
• Since 2007-10-18: 400267 - short events besides a whole-day spanning event are leaving the time scale grid
• Since 2007-10-30: 401731 - Modified Occurrence Shown twice in alarm dialog
• Since 2007-11-15: 403922 - Multiweek scroll / next / previous is too slow with multiple calendars
• Since 2007-11-21: 404900 - Add Accept/Decline to Calendar item’s context menu
• Since 2007-11-22: 405007 - Create unittest buildbots for Calendar
• Since 2007-12-11: 407915 - Snooze handling in new reminder dialog is hardly usable
• Since 2008-01-17: 412803 - Add selector of writeable calendars to the “click here to create a task” line
• Since 2008-01-18: 412914 - Enable offline caching for a calendar with many events -> startup horrible slow
• Since 2008-01-18: 412963 - [Offline] Disabled cached calendars become visible after synchronization
• Since 2008-01-23: 413641 - Launch Lightning Release Notes on update of extension
• Since 2008-03-10: 421986 - Adding events to invisible CalDAV calendars does not force visibility
• Since 2008-03-24: 424808 - addItem in calendar-month-day-box scales badly
• Since 2008-04-06: 427403 - CTRL+Cursor Down for selecting multiple items from a list of Mail messages or Tasks loses focus (need new keyboard shortcut for Lightning’s Today tab)
• Since 2008-04-27: 431076 - Add keyboard navigation/accessibility for the calendar views
• Since 2008-04-28: 431265 - No error messages or status if network calendar is unavailable
• Since 2008-06-10: 438369 - Create database backup before performing a database upgrade
• Since 2008-06-26: 441992 - caldav calendar isn’t switched off after canceling the login dialog
• Since 2008-06-29: 442607 - Reminder details link does not work if calendar window is closed
• Since 2008-09-01: 453186 - Drag and drop issues in day/week view if mouse leaves the calendar view (with exceptions)
• Since 2008-09-12: 455045 - current day highlight should trump currently selected day
• Since 2008-09-14: 455260 - Present CalDAV parsing error messages in activity manager
• Since 2008-09-20: 456208 - Disabling calendars autorefresh does not prevent cached calendar sync
• Since 2008-09-24: 456706 - Replying to a CalDAV invitation returns MODIFICATION_FAILED but succeeds.
• Since 2008-10-13: 459641 - Tabs and tab shortcut buttons should perform as drop target to convert events tasks, e-mail messages
• Since 2008-10-15: 460075 - Consolidate logging, support fine-grained logging
• Since 2008-10-29: 462277 - Turn on experimental cache by default
• Since 2008-10-29: 462280 - profile Tb startup time with and without Lightning
• Since 2008-10-30: 462305 - Lots of warning messages in Error Console when in offline mode
• Since 2008-11-05: 463275 - Edit Recurrence dialog shows wrong rule when editing event
• Since 2008-11-18: 465512 - New navigation bar contains some flaws under MacOS
• Since 2008-11-20: 466032 - Reminder dialog without events appears when experimental cache is enabled
• Since 2008-11-25: 466742 - Event color changing actions shouldn’t need re-calculation of calendar view [i.e. changing calendar of event]
• Since 2008-12-10: 468863 - The richlistbox item for a reminder has two buttons with empty accessible names
• Since 2008-12-28: 471378 - Create gnome theme (gnomestripe)
• Since 2009-01-07: 472448 - Minimonth missing accessible name and navigation
• Since 2009-01-21: 474607 - Events with start times and titles starting with a digit are truncated in all calendar views
• Since 2009-01-26: 475376 - Unify wording: “reminder” instead of “alarm”
• Since 2009-05-02: 491118 - reminder for recurring non-dismissed events fire again after hibernation (double/twice in alarm popup)
• Since 2009-05-08: 492069 - Lightning corrupts ATTENDEE / ORGANIZER with CN parameter that contains a comma
• Since 2009-05-23: 494598 - Update Lightning icons to match Thunderbird 3.0 default theme
• Since 2009-05-25: 494788 - Error: “too much recursion” when quickly reloading remote calendars (calIStatusObserver, calendar-statusbar.js)
• Since 2009-06-08: 496893 - The displaying of many alarms seems to take excessive resources
• Since 2009-06-09: 497095 - faulty operations retains the new ctag
• Since 2009-06-17: 498968 - Create a new, faster storage provider
• Since 2009-06-29: 501302 - Improve View performance by removing unneeded boxes (fixes regression: alarm icon cropped, misplaced)
• Since 2009-07-01: 501689 - Investigate making storage asynchronous
• Since 2009-07-02: 502095 - “Write” popup menu and Today pane statusbar item have odd icons
• Since 2009-07-07: 502936 - cached calendars should not be refreshed at launch time
• Since 2009-09-15: 516802 - Refactor & cleanup mode and calendar view switching + today pane code
• Since 2009-10-05: 520667 - Pressing Select All (Ctrl + A) in the tasks view selects all the items in the calendar view
• Since 2009-10-22: 523860 - Do not escape double quote character ” to \” in iCalendar output (potential RFC 2445 violation)
• Since 2009-11-03: 526288 - keyboard short cuts used to zoom message body only work after zooming using the view/zoom menu item
• Since 2009-11-07: 527254 - Lightning Command Controller tracker
• Since 2009-11-12: 528329 - Alarm is not fired when dismissed and later set reminder again
• Since 2009-11-22: 530423 - The m√©ga awful slowness of sunbird with caldav schedules
• Since 2009-12-05: 533096 - Consolidate theming to make more css common
• Since 2010-02-12: 545838 - Run mozmill tests as part of the build process
• Since 2010-02-18: 547168 - crash [@ libgobject-2.0.so.0.2200.4@0xc2c0] [@ wait_for_retrieval] on double-click, instead of opening New Event dialog
• Since 2010-05-09: 564697 - Provide debug symbols of calendar binaries for crash report analyses
• Since 2010-05-20: 567197 - Most of entities calendar.context.delete* are useless
• Since 2010-06-21: 573568 - Lightning does not play well with Personas (text-shadow and background issues)
• Since 2010-06-29: 575782 - Lightning 1.0 beta 2 does not work with non-ASCII characters in event names
• Since 2010-08-29: 591742 - Import and Export is broken [Exception "Component returned failure code: 0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE) [nsIJSCID.getService]“]
• Since 2010-08-29: 591744 - All calendars and events lost after restart [Error: Timezone Service not initialized]

One can get the latest Lightning .xpis here.

Sunbird will no longer be actively developed by the Calendar team.

August 30, 2010 08:56 AM

Previous TB release – 3.1.2 | Current TB pre-release – 3.2a1? | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central)

Thunderbird-specific: (32)

• Fixed: 309121 - Add account name for error messages
• Fixed: 348048 - add a 512×512 icon to the Thunderbird icon file
• Fixed: 349714 - new flag not removed from cross-folder saved search when last new message is read
• Fixed: 362455 - Build system does not honor –disable-printing
• Fixed: 380583 - when ISPdata wizardSkipPanels set to false, leaveMessagesOnServer does not work
• Fixed: 462121 - Reply function is broken. error identitiesCount is not defined
• Fixed: 474721 - messagereader: message header should not prefer the address book over the message headers as a source of display names
• Fixed: 506202 - Hook up mozmill tests to make package-tests and support running packaged test style
• Fixed: 533447 - Update files with locales to include in the Thunderbird 3.0.x builds
• Fixed: 538750 - One thread involving multiples identities of me is incorrectly summarized as two distinct conversations
• Fixed: 551747 - Use HTML 5 ‘placeholder’ attribute instead of ‘emptyText’
• Fixed: 556114 - crash [@ activateWindow]
• Fixed: 562708 - Folder preference for gloda indexing does not work for trash/junk/outbox folders (not retained)
• Fixed: 566282 - Error message: this._updateVisibleText is not a function
• Fixed: 569048 - Make notifications work with KDE
• Fixed: 573771 - Advanced->Reading & Display->Close message window on delete pref text incomplete
• Fixed: 575018 - Wrong commandkey label Ctrl+G in Edit -> Find -> Find in this message vs. Find Again
• Fixed: 576611 - Allow address headers to efficiently expand if no “more” is desired
• Fixed: 578320 - Setting Thunderbird up for Scots Gaelic (gd)
• Fixed: 578331 - c-c: Trunk should use background-clip instead of moz-background-clip
• Fixed: 579470 - POP3 status message “checking %S for new messages” is incorrectly capitalized
• Fixed: 579848 - empty folder pane on startup – exception message 0×80550007 chrome://messenger/content/folderPane.js :: ftvItem_getProperties (NS_MSG_ERROR_FOLDER_MISSING)
• Fixed: 581360 - Zebra striping under aero is inconsistent with file manager
• Fixed: 581922 - Random orange: TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | test-message-header.js | test_show_all_header_mode
• Fixed: 582695 - Port build changes from bug 579178 (Don’t enumerate components/*.manifest and chrome/*.manifest)
• Fixed: 585917 - LDAP searching broken in comm-central
• Fixed: 586770 - Missing extension points for the Account Provisioner.
• Fixed: 586849 - Windows installer packaging changes in bug 556644 will break Thunderbird
• Fixed: 587989 - Wrong text color on folder pane treechildren in selected status with new messages
• Fixed: 588754 - address autocomplete, selected address’ characters are white
• Fixed: 588786 - Error: assignment to undeclared variable index, at lots of places in msgHdrViewOverlay.js
• Fixed: 589393 - Thunderbird MozMill regressions following latest tracemonkey merge

MailNews Core: (41)

• Fixed: 182627 - Message body is not displayed for some messages if view attachments inline is false (name in Content-Type/filename in Content-Disposition for mail-body/mail-body-part forces “attachment” for Tb even though real mail body)
• Fixed: 183109 - Use nsISemanticUnitScanner to handle non-ASCII spam
• Fixed: 445141 - get rid of unneeded build system parts in comm-central
• Fixed: 496225 - Replace MOZ_DISABLE_VISTA_SDK_REQUIREMENTS in comm-central
• Fixed: 507804 - nsMsgComposeSecure.cpp: 3 strings to localize
• Fixed: 519761 - crash [@ nsImapOfflineSync::AdvanceToNextFolder()]
• Fixed: 531568 - crash [@ nsCOMPtr_base::~nsCOMPtr_base() | nsImapMailCopyState::~nsImapMailCopyState()], was [@ nsImapMailCopyState::`vector deleting destructor''(unsigned int)] in 3.0b4
• Fixed: 546177 - Port |Bug 513924 – remove tons of options from configure| to comm-central
• Fixed: 547119 - Imported Japanese Email from Outlook shows as garbled text
• Fixed: 558518 - Investigate and sync-up remaining diffs from rules.mk from c-c to m-c
• Fixed: 561851 - Hack libmime so that it notifies attachment sizes to GlodaMimeAttachments
• Fixed: 562115 - Moves/Archives/Replies don’t get indexed fast enough
• Fixed: 565852 - Login to IMAP server is invoked upon every view of multipart/mixed mail, because downloading of multipart/mixed mail doesn’t complete and LOGOUT is issued when other mail is clicked(Gmal IMAP,offline-use=off,mail.server.default.mime_parts_on_demand=true)
• Fixed: 569839 - Port bug 569365 (kill preprocessor.pl) to comm-central
• Fixed: 572937 - port Bug 521193 to comm-central (jemalloc support for Windows x64 build (VC 2005 / 2008))
• Fixed: 572974 - Partially downloaded mail data is mis-interpreted as complete mail data, if connection error occurs while downloading(IMAP, offline-use=off, mail.server.default.mime_parts_on_demand=false)
• Fixed: 576282 - Expose a JS representation of attachments (as in “message reader attachments”) for MimeMessages
• Fixed: 579781 - yyerror should be const in nsVCard.cpp warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’
• Fixed: 579795 - warning: the address of ‘digest’ will always evaluate as ‘true’ in nsPop3Protocol::SendPassword
• Fixed: 579798 - warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’ in MimeOptions_write
• Fixed: 579799 - warning: m_notifyFolderLoaded will be initialized after m_flags in nsLocalMailCopyState::nsLocalMailCopyState
• Fixed: 579800 - warning: comparison between signed and unsigned integer expressions in nsMsgLocalMailFolder
• Fixed: 579801 - warning: array subscript has type ‘char’ in ImportCharSet::stricmp
• Fixed: 579802 - warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’ in nsOutlookCompose.cpp
• Fixed: 579803 - warning: comparison between signed and unsigned integer expressions in nsOutlookCompose::FillMailBuffer
• Fixed: 579804 - warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’ in nsEudoraStringBundle.cpp
• Fixed: 579805 - warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’ in nsEudoraMailbox.cpp
• Fixed: 579806 - warning: comparison between signed and unsigned integer expressions in nsEudoraMailbox
• Fixed: 579809 - warning: comparison between signed and unsigned integer expressions in nsNNTPNewsgroupList
• Fixed: 579833 - warning: In constructor nsMsgDBEnumerator::nsMsgDBEnumerator, mClosure will be initialized after mIterateForwards
• Fixed: 580143 - customDBHeaders has no effect on nsIMsgDBHdr with NNTP
• Fixed: 581838 - Make code to mark files as sparse use JS ctypes
• Fixed: 583587 - Add In-Reply-To or References header when forwarding a message
• Fixed: 584026 - Fork abCardOverlay.xul
• Fixed: 585927 - Mail bloat tests need upgrading to account for manifest changes
• Fixed: 586742 - Add an attachmentInfos noun to gloda messages, including, but not limited to, attachment url, name, size, and content-type
• Fixed: 587582 - ReferenceError: gCurrStatus is not defined in various mailnews xpcshell-tests
• Fixed: 587608 - Feed reader broken by regexp failure
• Fixed: 589232 - Windows l10n nightly builds are failing on central
• Fixed: 589438 - Set MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET properly per-architecture in comm-central
• Fixed: 589507 - Port Bug 578563 |Make objdir builds the default in client.mk| to comm-central

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-thunderbird3.2 marked as “alpha1+” - tentative query): (0)

Official Windows, Official Windows installer (discussion)

Official Linux (i686), Official Linux (x86_64)

Official Mac (Universal binary) (2010-08-28 build)

August 30, 2010 08:24 AM

Previous TB release – 3.1.2 | Current TB pre-release – 3.2a1? | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central)

Thunderbird-specific: (26)

• Fixed: 392680 - Clicking Get Mail twice or during startup (while first round not finished) returns modal “This folder is being processed. Please wait until processing is complete to get messages.” dialog / error message [pop]
• Fixed: 449383 - “New Tag…” command should be at top of the message tags list (to go well with long list)
• Fixed: 456596 - emails with lots of addresses in the To: field should only show first N by default, not just one address + “more” designation
• Fixed: 458770 - Enable predefined IMAP settings for Google Apps email accounts
• Fixed: 466311 - Accounts and folders missing after installs of Thunderbird 3
• Fixed: 490234 - [autoconfig] New Quick Account doesn’t support Google Apps
• Fixed: 520214 - “remove attachment” is inconsistent and doesn’t work with multi-select
• Fixed: 521654 - Add “Open All…” to File > Attachments Menu
• Fixed: 525987 - Message > Archive and New Tag should be repositioned within their menus
• Fixed: 551706 - Manual Check Mail Doesn’t Work
• Fixed: 554311 - Shredder layout needs to be align after Bug 538187
• Fixed: 565045 - “Get Mail” button is broken (by customization of header pane toolbar)
• Fixed: 571264 - Autoconfiguration of new account ignores ISP’s provided values if the password is wrong
• Fixed: 575864 - message pane reappears when menu View->Layout option turned off
• Fixed: 576365 - Thunderbird 3.1 won’t play sound ( 3.0.5 works fine!!!)
• Fixed: 577343 - Errors/warnings should only be alerted if there is a msgWindow associated (i.e. as a result of a user action rather than a background action)
• Fixed: 578047 - More native look on Vista/Win7 for the aw-menulist
• Fixed: 578377 - Quick Filter Bar returns after being removed
• Fixed: 578441 - Use <menupopup> instead of <popup>
• Fixed: 579305 - Permanent orange: TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | test-message-header.js | test_show_all_header_mode
• Fixed: 579780 - Restore tabmail icons after landing of new icons for tabbrowser
• Fixed: 580108 - fake server timeout ends xpcshell tests successfully.
• Fixed: 580764 - Setting pop/imap port to the default value for the security setting not selected appears to get reset.
• Fixed: 581330 - All default smart folders empty since update TB3.0.6 -> TB3.1
• Fixed: 581921 - Random orange: TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | test-reply-to-list-from-address-selection.js | test_Reply_To_List_From_Address
• Fixed: 584351 - Rename mail/components/build/nsModule.cpp to nsMailComps.cpp

MailNews Core: (15)

• Fixed: 250878 - [import] Importing mail from Outlook 2002 imports HTML emails as plain text.
• Fixed: 377319 - Convert mailnews to frozen/external linkages
• Fixed: 551698 - multipart/alternative with inline part and text/plain part doesn’t display (When name of Content-Type and/or filename of Content-Disposition:inline is specified for mail-body part with text/xxx in multipart/alternative)
• Fixed: 565852 - Login to IMAP server is invoked upon every view of multipart/mixed mail, because downloading of multipart/mixed mail doesn’t complete and LOGOUT is issued when other mail is clicked(Gmal IMAP,offline-use=off,mail.server.default.mime_parts_on_demand=true)
• Fixed: 575179 - Port |Bug 517097 – make enabling debug symbols more sane| to comm-central
• Fixed: 575509 - Port |Bug 516758 – Remove more options from configure| to comm-central
• Fixed: 578918 - Indexing will not work, Gloda database journal is not created, warning in error console
• Fixed: 579168 - Activity Manager error message issued by IMAP code fails to identify message, or even mailbox, if error is for special IMAP command(eg. STATUS) which is issued without folder selection as RFC requests
• Fixed: 579241 - Update c-c packaging to account for libangle.so newly added to m-c.
• Fixed: 579704 - Port | Bug 580175 – make ccache option more flexible | to comm-central
• Fixed: 580270 - won’t save authentication method “normal password” as preference
• Fixed: 581707 - 3.0.6 update broke IMAP folder new message notification on some but not all IMAP folders (if STATUS error occurs on a folder, Tb doesn’t check new mail of other folders)
• Fixed: 582165 - crash [@ nsImapProtocol::SetupWithUrl ] with null m_transport [Mac]
• Fixed: 582290 - Automatic fetching of new feed messages not happening
• Fixed: 584523 - shouldn’t try to fetch audio parts inline

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-thunderbird3.2 marked as “alpha1+” - tentative query): (0)

Official Windows, Official Windows installer (discussion)

Official Linux (i686), Official Linux (x86_64)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

August 30, 2010 08:17 AM

Changelog for previous release (Thunderbird 3.1.1) | Changelogs for other Thunderbird releases

Released on 05 Aug 10, and this changelog was last updated on 07 Aug 10.

Thunderbird 3.1.2 has been released. Release notes are available. This post lists the improvements in Thunderbird 3.1.2 over Thunderbird 3.1.1. This list encompasses almost every single known fix that went into this release, but excludes platform-wide fixes. Do check out the known issues as well.

Impact key for security issues (fixed in this version – none at time of listing) that are listed on the Mozilla Foundation Security Advisories webpage:

• Critical: Vulnerability can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.
  
• High: Vulnerability can be used to gather sensitive data from sites in other windows or inject data or code into those sites, requiring no more than normal browsing actions.
  
• Moderate: Vulnerabilities that would otherwise be High or Critical except they only work in uncommon non-default configurations or require the user to perform complicated and/or unlikely steps.
• Low: Minor security vulnerabilities such as Denial of Service attacks, minor data leaks, or spoofs. (Undetectable spoofs of SSL indicia would have “High” impact because those are generally used to steal sensitive data intended for other sites.)
  

Other changes in Thunderbird 3.1.2: (6)

Thunderbird-specific: (3)

• Fixed: 576365 - Thunderbird 3.1 won’t play sound ( 3.0.5 works fine!!!)
• Fixed: 580764 - Setting pop/imap port to the default value for the security setting not selected appears to get reset.
• Fixed: 581330 - All default smart folders empty since update TB3.0.6 -> TB3.1

MailNews Core: (3)

• Fixed: 578918 - Indexing will not work, Gloda database journal is not created, warning in error console
• Fixed: 580270 - won’t save authentication method “normal password” as preference
• Fixed: 581707 - 3.0.6 update broke IMAP folder new message notification on some but not all IMAP folders (if STATUS error occurs on a folder, Tb doesn’t check new mail of other folders)

Official Windows installer

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

August 30, 2010 07:20 AM

Last week, while I was off on vacation, I set up a new blog for myself over at http://redpuma.net/blog/.

I've just now posted there about the MuteThread add-on for ignoring email threads that I've made available on addons.mozilla.org.

Since my new blog isn't yet known to Planet Mozilla or Planet Mozilla Messaging, I figured I'd add a pointer here so that folks would actually see it. :-)

August 27, 2010 11:48 PM

• use out-of-process plugins (OOPP) framework in SeaMonkey (Bug 545716): convert MailNews to the external API (Bug 377319)
• split mail_help.xhtml to several files (Bug 246405): Preferences, Account Settings, Working Offline
• expose camera functionality to web content (Bug 451674): add camera button to file input elements (Bug 567323)
• enable Bookmarks with the Sync add-on (Bug 585845): the bookmarks system has been reworked to use the Places framework shared with Firefox (Bug 498596)
• enable Tabs with the Sync add-on (Bug 567583): implemented methods of the Firefox TabBrowser API (Bug 558614, Bug 558673, Bug 579845)
• port Sync UI to SeaMonkey (Bug 576970): landed (Bug 571902) and enabled (Bug 571896) on Firefox trunk
  
• make SeaMonkey build with libxul (Bug 394502): build xpfe autocomplete from comm-central build.mk files instead of mozilla/ (Bug 450781)
  
• implement Indexed Database API (Bug 553412): asynchronous API implemented
• Direct2D (D2D) support: enabled in nightlies (Bug 549116), status exposed to about:support (Bug 587102)

• set correct file permissions when saving or detaching an attachment (Bug 533976)
• if SMTP server doesn't advertise auth mechanisms, try to send mail directly (Bug 534158)
• add option to keep the folders structure when archiving (no configuration UI yet, pref example: mail.server.server1.archive_keep_folder_structure) (Bug 573392)
• do not display return receipt notification bar for local mail after the first time the user responds to the request (Bug 558543)
• fix pasting images into the Compose window (Bug 572637)
• make sure clicking Get Mail for POP twice or during startup (while first round not finished) does not show alert "This folder is being processed. Please wait until processing is complete to get messages." (Bug 392680)
• make sure setting POP/IMAP port to the default value for the security setting that is not selected does not get reset (Bug 580764)
• make sure importing HTML mail from Outlook does not import emails as plain text (Bug 250878)
• fix loading multipart/mixed messages from the memory/disk cache (non-offline IMAP) (Bug 565852)
• do not fetch audio parts inline when doing IMAP mime parts on demand (Bug 584523)
• make sure title value of HTML signature file does not show up in signature (Bug 572290)
• make sure imported Japanese email from Outlook does not show as garbled text (Bug 547119)
• make sure to display multipart/alternative messages with inline part and text/plain part (when name of Content-Type and/or filename of Content-Disposition: inline is specified for mail body part with text/xxx in multipart/alternative) (Bug 551698)
• fix handling of stat errors and do not stat noselect folders when checking individual folders for new messages (Bug 581707)
• fix saving authentication method "normal password" as a preference (Bug 580270)

• make Address Book toolbars customizable (Bug 575956)

• remove old bookmarks system code (Bug 580663)
• add management UI for Places-based bookmarks (Bug 580662)
• switch browser UI to Places-based bookmarks (Bug 580660)
• initialize and migrate Places-based bookmarks (Bug 580658)
• add new Places core for bookmarks (and history) (Bug 580656)
• make the Modern theme work nicely with Places-based bookmarks (Bug 584752)
• remove double separator in menu of Bookmarks button in the Personal Toolbar (Bug 586050)

• make sure executing files via the Download Manager causes Win7 compatibility mode to apply to the downloaded file and not the application (Bug 567497)

• update Help for new Link Behavior preference panel (Bug 574609)
• remove references to nonexistent IDs from Help (excluding those of two follow-up bugs) (Bug 582710)

• fix menu bar keyboard navigation issue (Bug 346725)
• make strings in the XBL Bindings viewer easier to read (Bug 586149)

• load script source for files loaded by mozIJSSubScriptLoader.loadSubScript (Bug 449673)
• update for the new component registration world (Bug 576869)
• fix Display Profile Data to actually show something (Bug 460633)
• display array elements in sequence when an array is expanded (Bug 213494)
• exclude add-on components when excluding chrome files (Bug 356267)

• implement the accept attribute for audio/*, video/* (Bug 565272)
• buffer non-autobuffer videos upon first playback to ensure smooth playback (Bug 543769)
• send correct Accept header when requesting video and audio resources (Bug 489071)
• fix sound output via libesd if no esound daemon is running (Bug 579877)
• add Ogg support for HTMLMediaElement.buffered (Bug 462957)
• add WAV support for HTMLMediaElement.buffered (Bug 462957)
• add on* event handler property support for media events (Bug 569301)

• move the Link Behaviour preferences from the tabs pane to a separate pane (Bug 570970)
• remove redundant pref-offline UI which was commented out since 2001 (Bug 577514)
• perform case-insensitive comparison in the Add Languages dialog (e.g. find match between "en-US", set via intl.accept_languages, and "en-us") (Bug 370387)

• show Language category if there are no locale packs installed but some are pending install (Bug 572561)
• place Preferences button for add-ons in the entry of the digest view (Bug 562890)
• show version number in the list view for all types of add-ons (Bug 562052)
• make ratings display-only (Bug 567131)
• notify the application when add-on installs triggered by webpages fail or complete (Bug 552965, Bug 553455)
• add support for searching add-ons on AMO via the search bar (Bug 558287)
• do not show Add-on Manager multiple times (Bug 566593)
• support multi-package XPIs in the new add-ons manager (Bug 552742)
• implement the automatic vs. manual update design mockup (Bug 562622)

• make dragging the menubar drag the window on GTK themes where that should work (and also fix GTK resize drags to initialize drag better) (Bug 566480)
• add a scriptable interface to operating-system performance measurement APIs (Linux only for now) (Bug 568863)

• make lightweight themes / Personas work with the browser on Mac (Bug 579737)
• fix query icon for new Places UI (Bug 586026)
• add toggletoolbar=true to the windows that should have a Mac toolbar toggle pill (Bug 536904)

• add --disable-webm besides --disable-wave and --disable-ogg to configure for non-audio environment (Bug 572635)
• add -r/--rev option to control tag/revision to pull in client.py (Bug 556394)
• make it even easier to build with pymake (set MOZ_OBJDIR and detect TOPSRCDIR automatically) (Bug 572529)
• add configure option (--with-ccache) to use ccache (Bug 577636)
• make --with-ccache more powerful (add ability to detect ccache automatically) (Bug 579704)
• require yasm for architectures where we have code for it (Bug 582955)
• add jemalloc support for Windows x64 build (VC 2005/2008) (Bug 572937)
• use showIncludes for a substantial build perf win with pymake (Bug 518136)

• default to tabbed browsing (Bug 505311)
• change Restart dialog button labels from Cancel/Restart to Restart Later/Now (Bug 561176)
• make lightweight themes / Personas work with the browser window (Bug 563261)
• make the tab bar look better in the default theme, including lightweight themes (Bug 579732)
• improve the security button look in the default theme (Bug 579731)
• default to Find toolbar instead of inline FAYT/Find dialog (Bug 97023)
• focus FAYT/Find on correct tab so that it returns correct results (Bug 584630)
• make sure making changes in Page Info Permissions take effect on HTTPS sites (Bug 579747)
• draw Page Info tabs correctly (Bug 581686)
• remove gopher references from SeaMonkey code (Bug 572389)
• make about: link the SeaMonkey website and release notes, override Toolkit's about: (Bug 555939)
• make tabbrowser tell Gecko which tab is active and which is not (Bug 585264)
• load favicon images into faviconService when allowed to (Bug 585515)
• make sure favicons are set on the right tab (Bug 585511)

• add error console logging for missing/incorrect command-line handlers (Bug 579497)
• use GDI shaper by default on Windows XP and handle bitmap fonts better (Bug 561304)
• ignore 'www.' when searching in the location bar (strip out www. from found URLs and the query after already stripping off http:// etc. (Bug 461483)
• make sure windows are never movable in fullscreen mode (Bug 574861)
• bump Gecko version to 2.0x (Bug 570022)
• switch back to the default theme if the previous theme is made incompatible by an application update (Bug 565064)
• remove xpti.dat caching which harms us in runtime and code complexity (Bug 570488)
• make about:cache and about:cache-entry pretty (Bug 538813)
• do not send the useless crypto token in the UA string (Bug 572668)
• remove the UI language from the UA string and navigator.appVersion (Bug 572656)
• remove "Windows;" from the UA string (Bug 581783)
• a tag with target attribute and window.open('foo', 'bar') should not be treated identically by browser.link.restriction (Bug 351235)
• change -moz-resize to resize (Bug 553576)
• do not create temporary moz-screenshot.jpg when pasting images into rich text editors (Bug 490879)
• do not hard code get_discard_timer_ms, use a pref (image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms) instead (Bug 478398)
• implement -moz-font-feature-settings and -moz-font-language-override in CSS (Bug 511339)
• reorder size and position events in nsXULWindow so windows are positioned before they are shown (Bug 574690)
• implement the SVG load event in text/html, make the SVG load event in XML async and only supported on svg tag (Bug 552938)
• check X-Frame-Options header and redirect to about:blank if need be (Bug 475530)
• split about:memory reporting into more detailed sections for SQLite (Bug 575667)
• speed up createElement() (Bug 566466)
• support undo uninstall for restartless and already disabled add-ons (Bug 553494)
• implement -moz-appearance: button-arrow-up/down/next/previous (Bug 412773)
• support TrueType kerning in the harfbuzz font shaper back-end (Bug 575695)
• support a.text as defined in HTML5 (Bug 573258)
• add support for signed AUS update snippet (Bug 544442)
  
• implement the HTML5 hidden attribute (Bug 567663)
• add experimental MozTouch events (Bug 508906)
• do not trigger multiple Master Password prompts when filling form logins in multiple tab (Bug 499233)
• make InstallTrigger support cross-process communication (asynchronous with an optional callback) (Bug 550936)
• enable TLS false start by default and add a pref (security.ssl.enable_false_start) to disable it (Bug 583908)
  
• prevent a body-less window (title bar only) from appearing at the upper left corner of the screen (Bug 579421)
• prevent toolbar elements from losing the command attribute when removing and reinserting them (Bug 540838)
• enable WebGL shader validation and remove obsolete texture API (Bug 584815)
• add ANGLE/D3D WebGL support (Bug 583838)
• add pref (accessibility.mouse_focuses_formcontrol) to allow form elements to be focused when clicked (Bug 577316)
• make pc, in, mm and cm be a fixed number of CSS pixels (Bug 537890)

August 26, 2010 10:46 PM

As someone who works on an email client, I’m interested in making my communications more secure. So, with the assistance of Ludovic and Gozer, I got a client certificate that would allow me to sign and encrypt my messages. (Check out the envelope and lock in the image below.)

Most of the time, I’ll probably just sign my messages – after all, that’s what I’ve set it up to do by default – but it’s nice to know that if there’s something I need to encrypt, that option is now available to me.

August 25, 2010 09:34 PM

SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 marks a third preview milestone on the way to the future of Mozilla's SeaMonkey Internet suite and is now available for free download. Please note that this pre-release version is still intended for developers and testers only. As always, we appreciate any feedback you may have and encourage
users to help us by filing bugs.

The new improvements of this developer preview compared to the last one include:

• Personas support.
• A reworked bookmarks system.
• By default, tabs are opened instead of new windows.
• Address book toolbars can now be customized.
• Find in Page now works with a toolbar.
• New possibilites for web developers are supported, like CSS Transitions and the W3C Indexed Database API.

SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 is available for free download on the SeaMonkey website. Once you have downloaded and installed this release, we'd like to encourage you to get involved in discussing and reporting problems as well as further improving the product.

Thanks for testing and helping us to make SeaMonkey even better!

August 25, 2010 01:40 AM

• Releases:
  We're still in the release process for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3, this week I did a respin for a second build, and later regenerated updates to fix broken Linux update files.
• Build Machines:
  After doing the Mac ones two weeks ago, I also upgraded the Windows slaves to buildbot 0.8 this week, now only the master is left on the older version and can be upgraded whenever we're ready.
  On our update configs, I applied a small fix that was done for Firefox as well.
  When working on the buildbots and also the failed updates, I decided to update the buildmaster to the most-current buildbotcustom code we share with Firefox and Thunderbird builders, and unfortunately introduced two temporary breakages: The log encoding change needed to be reverted because I couldn't figure out the breakage, the test triggering failure could be solved with some tweaks, including a cleanup on Linux slaves.
• Build System:
  After I had driven it for some time, I finally landed Neil's fix(es) for xpfe autocomplete building with libxul, which now makes its building being driven from the comm-central side as well, and leaves the the only build breakage of --enable-libxul being in LDAP.
  For future major updates from SeaMonkey 2.0 to 2.1 (and probably later ones), it's necessary to send a better platform identifier to the update server, so that we only offer major updates to platforms supported for the newer version - I created a patch and landed it on both 2.0 and 2.1 trees.
  The Windows installer needed some changes after being made ready for the future "omnijar" packaging, I fixed a small glitch in the SeaMonkey installer fix that had generously been generated by mwu, who created the Firefox work as well.
  A related patch for jar reordering needed a change to config.mk, which I applied to comm-central as well - including a fixup of the command so that L10n packaging works as well.
  And as part of my test investigation work (see below), I checked package-compare and found a few small glitches, for which I created a patch.
• Automated tests:
  I filed a number of bugs about failures in our tests this week and investigated some some them. All our perma-oranges are hopefully filed now, the fix for one was a places issue (see there), for another, packaging one more new file. The others still need work, and help is wanted. Let's drive our tree to a green state - after Neil has fixed our long-going tabs leak, we can do it much more easily!
  I also reactivated the ID test for DOM Inspector after it had been deactivated when inspector was broken.
• Places:
  My followup patches for Neil's post-landing review comments, cleaning up a lot of the bookmarks code, esp. in the manager, could all land after some additional iterations and fixes. One more followup to that is now on file, dealing with access key problems.
  For the Firefox side, I tested and uploaded a patch for cleaning up the places library, which ports the applicable parts of Neil's comments back to Firefox code.
  Our ID check test found that we were including a bookmark key twice on Mac and Windows, which I fixed by removing the platform-specific binding and using the same, general, one on all platforms.
  I also had a few discussions on the add/edit bookmarks panel in the browser, now leading me to believe this should actually be an arrow panel pointing to a bookmark icon in the url bar - which I had left out in my original patches, but now sounds like an even better idea than before, showing if a page is already bookmarked and giving a fast (one-click) bookmarking option. To make the story short, I created a patch for this fast bookmarking button now.
• Tabbed Browsing:
  While it may seem slightly unrelated, the patch I created and landed for getBrowser() in mailnews is part of some work I'm doing for the browser to enable site-specific zoom settings, for which I attached a WIP patch that works but generates a strange error when used on the mailnews side.
• Data Manager:
  I updated the Data Manager patch for recent review comments, and of course, this only triggered a new round of comments. I also filed followup bugs for further work once this one has landed.
• Various Discussions:
  reviews, l10n.mk for Thunderbird, SeaMonkey Development Meeting, user agent string changes, SeaMonkey build machines, GSoC closing up and final evaluations, Firefox TabCandy, work on final look for new addons manager, etc.

August 23, 2010 06:52 PM

MDN Extended, the add-on which permits to send a return receipt (MDN) on message deletion, is now compatible with Thunderbird 3.1.

⇒ Download MDN Extended 1.2.0

--12:27, 20 August 2010 (CEST)

August 20, 2010 10:30 AM

Things have been a little slower lately, what with summer and family visits and so forth, but my project to support Exchange server in Thunderbird proceeds nevertheless. I’m starting to think seriously of an Alpha release.

Originally I had assummed that there would be changes required in core to support what I am doing. But so far, that has not been absolutely necessary. I had problems earlier with the database code, but I’ve managed to get around that by just using a standard nsMailDatabase object instead of doing my own version.

So I tried to build a version that could run on current Thunderbird 3.1 releases. That required staring at the build code for a couple of weeks, which I guess is the price that I pay for writing much of this extension in C++.  In the end, the magic that I needed was surprisingly simple:

ifndef MOZ_STATIC_MAIL_BUILD
 EXTRA_DSO_LIBS = msgbsutl
 else
 SHARED_LIBRARY_LIBS =
   $(DEPTH)/mailnews/base/util/$(LIB_PREFIX)msgbsutl_s.$(LIB_SUFFIX)
endif

I am now running my EWS extension with my normal Thunderbird profile – but I have not had the courage yet to use the email address for anything real. Fortunately, the spammers of the world have discovered my test address rkentjames@caspia.org, and are kindly providing me with a wide variety of test emails.

The question I have now is what is the minimum functionality required for an alpha release. I’ve recently added the ability to read attachments from my Exchange messages, but I don’t yet have the ability to create emails that contain attachments. I think that after I add that ability, I will have a basic email read/write capability, and will stop adding features and concentrate on fixing annoyances prior to releasing an alpha.

I’ll still be missing a zillion features, including:

• using the exchange address book
• copying and moving messages to other folders
• message filters

and a whole lot more. But the alpha application could be used to do a basic check of someone’s work email from a home Thunderbird installation.

August 18, 2010 06:57 PM

Following a period of discussion, comm-central is adopting the same super-review policy as mozilla-central. There are two exclusions to this: the suite/ and calendar/ directories which are covered by their own policies (suite/, calendar/).

The updated rules for comm-central reviews can be found here. We are also in the process of updating the super-review policy page to reference comm-central and the exclusions.

August 18, 2010 11:07 AM

I've been using Firefox 4.0b3 for a week or so now. As always when I switch to beta, I usually loose some functionality due to some extensions not being validated with the version of Firefox that I use. I've been using delicious to manage my bookmarks for the last two or three years, because it enables me to share my bookmarks (and I don't have a lot) with other computers, other browsers and with my friends (yes I'm a web social beast).

So this morning I was clearly happy to see that the delicious team had a nice extension in beta for me to try out. I was all happy about it and installed it. My bookmarks where back in place ;-) I then noticed that I had lost mouse gesture. I disabled the extension and woot mouse gesture was back. I then send a little email as a piece of feedback to the delicious mailing list.

Two hours later I was contacted on instant messaging by the Yahoo developer. And we tried to figure out what was going on. The only thing That was left was my personas theme. So I went to getpersonas.com , I then noticed that it solved my mouse gesture issue. Restarted Firefox and yet again lost gesture until I opened getpersonas.com in one of my tabs. So I have this weird bug about an extension, a theme that will work together if I load the web site where I got the extension from, I'd love to file a bug, but I have no idea, where/why/how.

August 17, 2010 10:12 AM

• Releases:
  After the code freeze for 2.1a3 on Wednesday morning, I did some release driving, finally kicking off the first builds for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 - but we already found at least two issues we need to solve in a respin.
• Build Machines:
  Did some manual time adjustments and finally filed a bug for getting some NTP access again for the build machines. I guess the buildmaster sees how much more work than the available slaves can bare it has to do, so it squeezes an additional minute into every day, but in the end that's not too helpful, given the rest of the world doesn't agree with that.
• Bustages:
  We had to fight a few bustages this week, I landed fixes for two mozilla-central-caused compile problems (patches not done by me) and worked up a fix for a ChatZilla-related Mac problem to get things going again.
• Tabbed Browsing:
  The patch for wrong tabs loading icons as well as the one for loading favicon.ico for bookmarks/history if the right pref is set could both land for 2.1a3, the former fixed a really nasty tabbrowser bug I'm glad we have caught. Unfortunately, I introduced a new bug with this patch, but Serge jumped in and fixed that thankfully.
• Places:
  After the main patch landed late the week before, I could also get the Modern theme fixes in so things don't look too extremely ugly there for Alpha 3, even if some general work is still to be done for later mailestones and final.
  I could also land parts of the review comment backports to Firefox, which is nice for both of our products.
  I also worked on addressing a number of post-landing review comments by Neil, which will result in some nice cleanup of the code.
• German L10n:
  As I'm planning to put up another language pack for 2.1a3, I did put some work into the German locale, bringing it up to the current state of trunk, which funnily required a number of string for my own landed patches like lightweight themes and places bookmarks, but I adopted a good number of those from Firefox.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Development Meeting, user agent string changes, possible organization for SeaMonkey, upcoming trip to Mozilla HQ, NNTP and Thunderbird, venkman and SeaMonkey 2.1, putting debugQA on AMO, omnijar, places landing aftermath, Mozilla websites, async redirects and high-profile add-ons, shape of the tree, etc.

August 16, 2010 07:36 PM

August 15, 2010 09:26 PM

August 14, 2010 07:01 PM

Use Jetpack?  Occasionally write unit tests so you won’t be a complete hypocrite when criticizing other people’s code?  Think that picture up above looks more useful than this?:

error: fail: list contents ("4,5,6,7" != "3,4,5,6,7")
info: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "resource://wmsy-jetpack-core-lib/timer.js", line 57, in notify
    this._callback.apply(null, []);
  File "resource://wmsy-jetpack-core-lib/unit-test.js", line 257, in anonymous
    timer.setTimeout(function() { onDone(self); }, 0);
  File "resource://wmsy-jetpack-core-lib/unit-test.js", line 282, in runNextTest
    self.start({test: test, onDone: runNextTest});
  File "resource://wmsy-jetpack-core-lib/unit-test.js", line 300, in start
    this.test.testFunction(this);
  File "resource://wmsy-jetpack-core-lib/unit-test.js", line 57, in runTest
    test(runner);
  File "resource://wmsy-wmsy-tests/test-vs-static.js", line 37, in anonymous
    slice.seek(6, 2, 2);
  File "resource://wmsy-wmsy-lib/wmsy/viewslice-static.js", line 51, in anonymous
    this._list.slice(this.bufLow, this.bufHigh));
  File "resource://wmsy-wmsy-tests/test-vs-static.js", line 31, in anonymous
    "list contents");
  File "resource://wmsy-jetpack-core-lib/unit-test.js", line 229, in assertEqual
    this.fail(message);
  File "resource://wmsy-jetpack-core-lib/unit-test.js", line 147, in fail
    console.trace();

Then do I have an .el for you!  This lives here.  You mileage may vary and may involve things catching on fire which can, in turn, affect your mileage.

August 13, 2010 05:03 PM

A long time ago, when the Mozilla Try Server was almost brand new, we took it, applied a generous amount of duct tape to it, and called it the Thunderbird Try Server.

It worked, but barely. Since then, the Mozilla #build folks did an amazing job adding new features to theirs, fixing bugs, and making it more awesome in general. Unfortunately, the Thunderbird Try Server stayed behind, the way it was. Bugs against it were piling up, especially from folks using both try servers and noticing all the missing features compared to the Mozilla Try Server.

All this is about to change! The Mozilla Messaging Build team has worked on recreating a try server with all the new features (and codebase) that runs the Mozilla Try Server.

On Thursday, we'll be switching over to the new try server. What does this mean?

• push to try (try-comm-central)
• e-mail notification of build completion
• try builds for any comm-* branch
• packaged mozmill tests
• double the builders
• and much more...

By just doing:

$> hg push -f ssh://hg.mozilla.org/try-comm-central/

from a comm-* checkout, you'll be able to trigger try builds. It's that easy!

For more detailled instructions, you can just refer to the Mozilla Try Server documentation, just use /try-comm-central/ where it says /try/, that's the only difference. Also check the Mozilla Messaging Try Server wiki page, for documentation specifically about our try server (not updated yet)

Right now, we will only be running regular builds and mozmill runs, as the other type of builds are all waiting on the libxul work to complete before they can be made to work easily. Also, there are various features that we want to see in our try server that will not be done, but they will be tackled one by one over the upcoming weeks.

There are 2 important thing to note. The first one is that we'll be turning off the web interface for our try server that allowed for arbitrary patches to be submitted. It was a mess of code, and would simply not work right in this new push-to-try way of doing things.

I know the Mozilla #build folks are working on a new, shinier web interface to their try server, and once they do, we'll just port it over as well.

The second thing (and I suspect many will be happy about that) is that since push-to-try works via hg.mozilla.org, there is not going to be a need for a special certificate to gain access to it. Anybody who already has hg.mozilla.org access gets automatic access to our try server!

As before, you will be able to follow the status of builds on the ThunderbirdTry tinderbox tree.

For bugs specific to our try server, you can file bugs under Mozilla Messaging > Try Server

August 11, 2010 08:36 PM

I'm now Usul instead of _Tsk_ on irc.mozilla.org. It's one character shorter. It was available, and I'm a fan so I took it. I did that while watching the Dunes series on TV. I now have a nick that people can pronounce, I sure nobody will pronounce it the same way :-)

August 11, 2010 01:41 PM

We've been a bit quiet since the 0.2 release, but we haven't slept all of this time, so let's do another status update!

After some time spent polishing the new website and dealing with post-release work (like testing and enabling major updates), we have started working toward Instantbird 0.3:

• Some major refactoring work to allow protocol plugins to be written fully in JavaScript had started a long time before the final 0.2 release. This work was being done in the js-proto branch. The branch has been merged so that our nightly testers can help spot new issues in 0.3a1pre nightly builds. They have been super helpful, and have found 2 regressions, which are now fixed.
• Instantbird 0.2 is based on the mozilla-1.9.2 platform. Instantbird 0.3 will be based on Mozilla 2.0. The work to switch to using code from mozilla-central is almost completed. This involved updating our build system (which is a copy of the comm-central one), changing the way our XPCOM components are registered, and other adjustments to make Instantbird's code work with a newer Mozilla. This work has happened in a mozilla2 branch in our repository. The branch isn't merged yet because there remains a serious regression that we need to fix (JavaScript code included in message styles isn't executed).
• We have welcomed new translators, who have enthusiastically started translations of Instantbird into 7 new locales (Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish and Ukrainian)!

Development is slower than usual this month, because some members of the team, including myself, are taking some time away from the Internet.

In the relatively near future, we will finish the work to switch to Mozilla 2.0, and upgrade libpurple to the latest released version (2.7.*).

August 10, 2010 10:05 PM

Mozilla community contributor, fuzzyfox, has created a very nice screencast that explains the Quick Filter Toolbar in Thunderbird 3. Check it out!

Got your own screencast that explains Thunderbird? Or do you have favourite one that explains Thunderbird? Then let me know in the comments and I’ll post about the best ones here.

August 10, 2010 09:56 PM

This means doccelerator and my Tinderbox scraper that chucked stuff into a CouchDB for exposure by a modified bugzilla jetpack.  Either couch went crazy or someone gave it a request that is ridiculously expensive to answer with a database the accumulated size of the tinderbox database.  I’m not aware of any trivial ways to contend with the latter.  Judging by the logs, it looks like 2 people other than myself used these services, so, my apologies to those cool, insightful, forward-looking individuals.

The specific services are probably not coming back.  doccelerator is being subsumed into something else that better meets documentation needs and will be more fully baked, more on that soon.  I got the impression at the summit that the tinderbox problem is in hand, or very close to someone’s hand; maybe one of those robot grabby-arm things is involved?  My reviewboard with bugzilla hacks instance is sticking around for the time being, but I think wheels are turning elsewhere in Mozilla on that front too, so hopefully my install is mooted before it falls over.

Lest there be any doubt, all clicky services are provided on a self-interested basis… I am happy when they benefit others, but I do these things for the benefit of my own productivity/sanity and they are hosted using my own resources.  (While I had higher hopes for doccelerator, the MoMo-resourced couchdb service provisioning never happened so doccelerator never got pushed public with nightly updates because of said clicky resource constraints.)

August 09, 2010 07:05 AM

Previous Lightning release (1.0 Beta 2) | Next planned Lightning (1.0 beta 3?) | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central)

Common (excluding Website bugs): (1)

• Fixed: 572489 - Cached calendar refresh can cause database table is locked error

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-calendar1.0+): (92)

• Since 2004-04-29: 242112 - Make calendar keyboard accessible
• Since 2004-09-17: 260121 - Make datepicker and timepicker keyboard accessible
• Since 2004-11-17: 270501 - the list of events for the listbox (unifinder) is sorted three times
• Since 2004-12-05: 273279 - no visual status mark on tentative or cancelled events/tasks
• Since 2005-11-01: 314594 - No error message if invalid URL used for new calendar, creates invalid calendars
• Since 2005-11-10: 315959 - profile ICS calendar reading
• Since 2006-03-04: 329387 - Dismissed alarm behave erratically when event is moved
• Since 2006-03-20: 331112 - RFC description of WKST does not appear to be followed
• Since 2006-06-14: 341537 - Leaking factories/modules for some components
• Since 2006-07-28: 346278 - Allow building localized lightning langpacks
• Since 2006-08-22: 349641 - Lightning asks for master password again
• Since 2006-08-22: 349673 - Alarm dialog shown for new events that are scheduled in the past
• Since 2006-09-30: 354935 - undo after moving a single occurrence does the wrong thing
• Since 2006-10-18: 357112 - Drag and drop of multiday-event doesn’t drop on days the shadow suggests
• Since 2006-11-16: 360916 - Snoozed alarm fires at old event time although event time has been changed
• Since 2006-11-21: 361424 - month view day boxes should draw eventboxes in a batch
• Since 2007-01-06: 366139 - Wrong end time set on multi-day events
• Since 2007-01-16: 367131 - Allow click and drag event creation in time scale (hours column)
• Since 2007-03-02: 372424 - iTIP/iMIP invitation bar doesn’t disappear after changing e-mail folder
• Since 2007-03-08: 373251 - Can open multiple windows of a single event/task from Agenda, Task lists and Unifinder
• Since 2007-03-24: 375210 - Revisit alarm dialog dismissal/snooze user experience
• Since 2007-07-23: 389281 - Write to read-only ICS store creates event on screen
• Since 2007-07-31: 390293 - Event/task dialog does nothing upon “Save and close” when Thunderbird/Sunbird main window is closed
• Since 2007-08-29: 394195 - Dialogs need a scroll bar or minimum height/width
• Since 2007-09-08: 395504 - Allow to have localized default values for some preferences (lightning-l10n.js not shipped)
• Since 2007-09-24: 397323 - Invite Attendees dialog: cannot move/resize the splitter between attendees and grid
• Since 2007-10-18: 400267 - short events besides a whole-day spanning event are leaving the time scale grid
• Since 2007-10-30: 401731 - Modified Occurrence Shown twice in alarm dialog
• Since 2007-11-03: 402376 - Custom reminder dialog is hardly localizable
• Since 2007-11-15: 403922 - Multiweek scroll / next / previous is too slow with multiple calendars
• Since 2007-11-21: 404900 - Add Accept/Decline to Calendar item’s context menu
• Since 2007-11-22: 405007 - Create unittest buildbots for Calendar
• Since 2008-01-17: 412803 - Add selector of writeable calendars to the “click here to create a task” line
• Since 2008-01-18: 412914 - Enable offline caching for a calendar with many events -> startup horrible slow
• Since 2008-01-18: 412963 - [Offline] Disabled cached calendars become visible after synchronization
• Since 2008-01-23: 413641 - Launch Lightning Release Notes on update of extension
• Since 2008-03-10: 421986 - Adding events to invisible CalDAV calendars does not force visibility
• Since 2008-03-24: 424808 - addItem in calendar-month-day-box scales badly
• Since 2008-04-06: 427403 - CTRL+Cursor Down for selecting multiple items from a list of Mail messages or Tasks loses focus (need new keyboard shortcut for Lightning’s Today tab)
• Since 2008-04-27: 431076 - Add keyboard navigation/accessibility for the calendar views
• Since 2008-04-28: 431265 - No error messages or status if network calendar is unavailable
• Since 2008-06-10: 438369 - Create database backup before performing a database upgrade
• Since 2008-06-26: 441992 - caldav calendar isn’t switched off after canceling the login dialog
• Since 2008-06-29: 442607 - Reminder details link does not work if calendar window is closed
• Since 2008-09-01: 453186 - Drag and drop issues in day/week view if mouse leaves the calendar view (with exceptions)
• Since 2008-09-12: 455045 - current day highlight should trump currently selected day
• Since 2008-09-14: 455260 - Present CalDAV parsing error messages in activity manager
• Since 2008-09-20: 456208 - Disabling calendars autorefresh does not prevent cached calendar sync
• Since 2008-09-24: 456706 - Replying to a CalDAV invitation returns MODIFICATION_FAILED but succeeds.
• Since 2008-10-13: 459641 - Tabs and tab shortcut buttons should perform as drop target to convert events tasks, e-mail messages
• Since 2008-10-15: 460027 - Check what files can be removed during upgrade to 1.0 and add them to removed-files.in
• Since 2008-10-15: 460075 - Consolidate logging, support fine-grained logging
• Since 2008-10-29: 462277 - Turn on experimental cache by default
• Since 2008-10-29: 462280 - profile Tb startup time with and without Lightning
• Since 2008-10-30: 462305 - Lots of warning messages in Error Console when in offline mode
• Since 2008-11-04: 463030 - Until date of recurrence rule can set before start date of event
• Since 2008-11-05: 463275 - Edit Recurrence dialog shows wrong rule when editing event
• Since 2008-11-18: 465512 - New navigation bar contains some flaws under MacOS
• Since 2008-11-20: 466032 - Reminder dialog without events appears when experimental cache is enabled
• Since 2008-11-25: 466742 - Event color changing actions shouldn’t need re-calculation of calendar view [i.e. changing calendar of event]
• Since 2008-12-10: 468863 - The richlistbox item for a reminder has two buttons with empty accessible names
• Since 2008-12-28: 471378 - Create gnome theme (gnomestripe)
• Since 2009-01-07: 472448 - Minimonth missing accessible name and navigation
• Since 2009-01-21: 474607 - Events with start times and titles starting with a digit are truncated in all calendar views
• Since 2009-01-26: 475376 - Unify wording: “reminder” instead of “alarm”
• Since 2009-05-02: 491118 - reminder for recurring non-dismissed events fire again after hibernation (double/twice in alarm popup)
• Since 2009-05-08: 492069 - Lightning corrupts ATTENDEE / ORGANIZER with CN parameter that contains a comma
• Since 2009-05-23: 494598 - Update Lightning icons to match Thunderbird 3.0 default theme
• Since 2009-06-08: 496893 - The displaying of many alarms seems to take excessive resources
• Since 2009-06-09: 497095 - faulty operations retains the new ctag
• Since 2009-06-17: 498968 - Create a new, faster storage provider
• Since 2009-06-24: 500156 - Investigate the influence of native theming of groupboxes on Windows
• Since 2009-06-27: 500916 - Access key conflict in menu “Events and Tasks”
• Since 2009-06-29: 501302 - Improve View performance by removing unneeded boxes (fixes regression: alarm icon cropped, misplaced)
• Since 2009-07-01: 501689 - Investigate making storage asynchronous
• Since 2009-07-02: 502095 - “Write” popup menu and Today pane statusbar item have odd icons
• Since 2009-07-07: 502936 - cached calendars should not be refreshed at launch time
• Since 2009-09-15: 516802 - Refactor & cleanup mode and calendar view switching + today pane code
• Since 2009-10-05: 520667 - Pressing Select All (Ctrl + A) in the tasks view selects all the items in the calendar view
• Since 2009-10-22: 523860 - Do not escape double quote character ” to \” in iCalendar output (potential RFC 2445 violation)
• Since 2009-11-03: 526288 - keyboard short cuts used to zoom message body only work after zooming using the view/zoom menu item
• Since 2009-11-07: 527254 - Lightning Command Controller tracker
• Since 2009-11-12: 528329 - Alarm is not fired when dismissed and later set reminder again
• Since 2009-11-22: 530423 - The m√©ga awful slowness of sunbird with caldav schedules
• Since 2009-12-04: 532874 - Unable to add new events or tasks because units for alarm preferences are missing
• Since 2009-12-05: 533096 - Consolidate theming to make more css common
• Since 2010-02-12: 545838 - Run mozmill tests as part of the build process
• Since 2010-02-18: 547168 - crash [@ libgobject-2.0.so.0.2200.4@0xc2c0] [@ wait_for_retrieval] on double-click, instead of opening New Event dialog
• Since 2010-05-09: 564697 - Provide debug symbols of calendar binaries for crash report analyses
• Since 2010-05-20: 567197 - Most of entities calendar.context.delete* are useless
• Since 2010-06-29: 575782 - Lightning 1.0 beta 2 does not work with non-ASCII characters in event names
• Since 2010-07-21: 580785 - 3.1.1 with google calendar and contacts freezes

One can get the latest Lightning .xpis here.

Sunbird will no longer be actively developed by the Calendar team.

August 06, 2010 07:32 PM

Welcome to our second add-on release! This is our first release of a new add-on called Thunderbird Contacts.

Thunderbird Contacts was started by the Mozilla Labs team as Firefox Contacts, an experiment with contacts inside the browser. We’ve adapted their add-on to work inside of Thunderbird and added some new features just for Thunderbird.

The goal of add-on is to experiment in evolving the address book of Thunderbird beyond what it currently is today. Thunderbird Contacts isn’t a standalone address book, instead it understands that your contacts live on the web as much as they do inside Thunderbird. The add-on can pull in contact data from various services where your contacts already exist.

Currently it connects with the following services:

• Thunderbird Address Book
• Native Address Books (Mac Address book)
• Facebook
• GMail
• LinkedIn
• Plaxo
• Twitter
• Yahoo!

How it works

When you install the add-on you’ll be shown this list of services. You can connect to whichever services you’d like to pull in contacts to your local Thunderbird.

As you pull in contacts from each of the services Thunderbird Contacts will attempt to merge the same contacts from different services into a single contact.

Then as you view contacts the add-on will go “spider” out to various services for more information about your contact; this can find flickr photos and websites for the person.

What’s Next?

Future versions of this add-on will likely experiment with organizing the contacts in different ways. Right now there’s a simple list or card like view and we’d like to take those interfaces further. If you have any thoughts or comments let us know in the feedback channel. If you’re interested in trying something just fork the code and start working.

For more information and a screen cast explaining the add-on check out the Thunderbird Contacts project page.

August 04, 2010 11:18 PM

CardDAV, an address book client/server protocol (vCard over WebDAV) designed to synchronize contact data, is now available in DavMail gateway since version 3.8.0.

The development of this new feature in DavMail has been sponsored by the French Ministry of Defense through the Trustedbird project.

DavMail is a POP/IMAP/SMTP/CalDAV/CardDAV/LDAP Exchange gateway allowing users to use any mail/calendar client (e.g. Thunderbird with Lightning) with a Microsoft Exchange server, even from the internet or behind a firewall through Outlook Web Access webmail (OWA) or Exchange Web Services (EWS). DavMail is a free software implemented in Java and distributed under the GNU GPL license.

CardDAV can be used in Thunderbird with the SOGo Connector add-on.

⇒ Download DavMail

--09:29, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

August 04, 2010 09:29 AM

The Multi-LDAP add-on, which enables Thunderbird to use several LDAP directories simultaneously for address autocompletion, has been updated and is now compatible with Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.

Several bugs have also been fixed and LDAP session management has been improved.

⇒ Download Multi-LDAP 1.1.4

--08:48, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

August 03, 2010 08:48 AM

Even though SuMoMo doesn’t yet have a real localization dashboard (we’re working on it in bug 549407) and hasn’t been announced in the localization news groups, many folks have contributed to SuMoMo (check out the full list of SuMoMo contributors as of July 20th, 2010).

This is just a quick blog post to say thanks! And an official post on the l10n news groups is coming soon. Thanks to all localizers for their patience with the delay.

July 27, 2010 11:39 PM

Over the weekend, I decided to learn js-ctypes. The best way to learn an API is by using it for something non-trivial, so I wrote a patch to move a bit of code calling Win32 functions I had written a few months ago from C to JavaScript. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how simple it is to use.

• The documentation sucks a bit at the moment – I found that the best way to experiment was to use the xpcshell REPL. I’m sure this will be fixed in time for Firefox 4.0.
• The js-ctypes type hierarchy makes complete sense. I haven’t used any other equivalents (python ctypes, .NET P/Invoke), but I hope they’re similar.
• There is a good deal of type checking built into the API – more than I’m used to from a dynamic language, at any rate. If only JavaScript were statically typed…
• Declaring Win32 types and functions is simple enough – just look them up on MSDN. Declaring constants can be harder, since not all constant values are provided on MSDN. To get some of them, I had to resort to grepping the Microsoft SDK include directory, and in a couple of cases writing and compiling small C programs to print the value.
• Comparing pointers is annoying. That was probably what I spent the most time figuring out. I ultimately cast my voidptr_t into an intptr_t and worked with its value, which is a ctypes.Int64.
• I hit one major gotcha – in JavaScript, the operands of bitwise operators are signed 32-bit integers. In particular, 0x80000000 | 0x40000000 = –0x40000000 and not 0xC0000000. This impacts how bit flags work. Ways to avoid this include adding up the flags instead (as long as you know all the flags you’re adding are mutually exclusive) or simply using the composite flag.

Other than these two things, if you already have the C code in front of you, translating it to JavaScript line by line is quite straightforward. I didn’t deal with callbacks, so I’m sure there will be some added complexity there.

July 26, 2010 05:57 PM

As no critical issues have been reported in the recently released Instantbird 0.2, we have turned on major updates for users of Instantbird 0.1.2 and 0.1.3. If you are still using one of these old versions, you will receive a major update offer to get the newer Instantbird 0.2. It will look like this:

Unfortunately, due to a bug of the updater that shipped in the Windows version of Instantbird 0.1.3.1, the update won't be automatic for these users, who should download the full installer themselves. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

July 25, 2010 08:59 PM

Emacs users and would-be emacs users, are you tired of those emacs developers in their ivory towers not supporting buffer switching via touch-screen on a computer that’s not running emacs and using modern web browser technology instead of disproven parentheses-based technology?  Be tired no more!*

Thanks to Christopher Wellons and Chunye Wang’s work on emacs-httpd it is a simple matter to expose a JSON representation of the current set of frames/windows/buffers in your emacs session and provide non-REST manipulation mechanisms via a webserver implemented in elisp.

Once you have exposed an API, it is a subsequent simple matter to implement some JavaScript that understands these things and presents a nice UI.  In this case, we have used the Jetpack SDK, wmsy (the Widget Manifesting SYstem, an widgeting framework I am developing), and protovis.

The screenshot basically captures the entire feature-set:

• A protovis-based visualization that shows the location of all of the emacs “windows” (the things that show buffers).  Emacs reports to us the pixel-space coordinates/sizes of the “frames” (GUI windows) and “windows”, so this all comes magically for free.  The downside is your emacs windows need to be in the same coordinate space, so use of multiple X displays without use of DMX will likely lead to weird overlap.
  • The selected “window” in each “frame” gets a diamond.  The active frame’s diamond gets to be black instead of gray.
  • Clicking on a “window” focuses/raises the containing “frame” and selects the “window”.
• Buffers grouped by the directory they live in (if they have a backing file).
  • Buffers visible in windows have their background composed of the colors for all the windows they are in.
  • Buffers that are modified have their text colored red.
  • Buffers that have not been freshly displayed in a window recently have their text colored grey.
  • Clicking on a buffer displays it in what the UI believes to be the currently selected frame’s currently selected window.

* This entire paragraph is a joke**; no flaming necessary.

** ediosk is not a joke though.  I seriously have a touch-screen monitor hooked up to my windows build machine to the right of my two monitors hooked up to my linux/primary development machine.  While c-x b (icicle mode) will still be my dominant buffer switching mechanism, I expect ediosk to prove useful/amusing for cases where the number of buffers greatly exceeds my mental stack, when I am switching contexts, or when I am working in multiple branches simultaneously.

July 24, 2010 09:32 AM

module M {
   //In normal code this would define a global,
   //but not inside the module declaration. This
   //is likely to be an error(?) in Simple Modules.
   foo = "bar";

   //color is only visible within module M's block
   var color = "blue";

   //Creates a publicly visible property called
   //"name" on the module.
   export name = "Module M";

   //setColor is only visible within module M's block
   function setColor() {}

   //Creates a publicly visible property called
   //"reverseName" on the module whose value
   //is a function
   export function reverseName() {}
}

module jQuery = load “jquery.js”;

1. Stronger lexical scoping: no eval or with allowed in the modules, and a loaded module shares some lexical scope with the module that loaded it.
2. No access to a global object by default.
3. Hopefully better syntax for declaring modules over the existing function-based module pattern.

module jQuery {
   export jQuery = function () {};
}

/*** In some other file ***/
module jQuery = load “jquery.js”;
//ugly
var selection = jQuery.jQuery();

//less ugly, but more typing, so still ugly
var $ = jQuery.jQuery;
var selection = $();

• the expanded, stricter lexical scoping is nice, but for a web developer, it is a slight incremental benefit if JSLint is already in use.
• Not being able to set a function as the module value means the syntax is not a net win over the function-based module pattern.

July 23, 2010 10:37 PM

Instantbird 0.2 uses the multitouch feature of Macbook touchpads in conversation windows:

• Pinch in or out 2 fingers to change the zoom level.
• Swipe up (3 fingers) to scroll to the top of the conversation, down to scroll to the last message. This saves time when looking for an old messages in the conversation (for example, using the Find feature) and then going back to the display of the most recent messages.
• Twist left or right to select the tab at the left or right of the currently selected tab.
• Swipe left or right (3 fingers) to change the selected tab to the previously selected tab. This gesture is probably the most useful one: it's very convenient when reading quickly a message in a newly opened tab and then going back to the conversation tab where an active conversation is occurring, or when actively participating in 2 discussions and repeatedly switching between 2 tabs.

July 22, 2010 08:04 PM

I think this applies to all of the Mozilla Communities. Not just Thunderbird’s communities and not just the support communities. Thanks to Ludo for taking this photo at the Mozilla Summit a few weeks ago in Whistler.

July 22, 2010 03:46 AM

Thunderbird since version 3 has had experimental support for junk filtering in newsgroups. The feature basically works fine, but the user interface mostly fights against your attempts to use it. I’d like to give brief instructions here for anyone who wants to try it.

You’ll need to install my addon JunQuilla to enable one critical piece of user interface. JunQuilla supports a folder property that lets you selectively enable or disable junk processing for a tree of folders. So after you’ve installed JunQuilla, enable processing of junk for a newsgroup:

This will run future posts sent to the newsgroup m.d.a.thunderbird through the bayes junk filter in Thunderbird. After this is enabled, some of the junk management controls on the folder should be enabled. Try “Run Junk Controls on Folder” to process existing posts for junk.

But nothing will appear to happen when you do, because there is no functionality to delete or hide the junk messages for newsgroups built in. Still, you can see the results using JunQuilla’s “junk percent” and “junk status +” columns:

The next step is to remove those junk messages from your view. The easiest thing to do is to create a virtual folder that shows the messages in the newsgroup without the junk messages. This is where the user interface fights against you. But you can trick it in the following manner.

Create a virtual folder on a message folder with search criteria “Junk Percent < 80″. Save the folder as a subfolder of a local mail folder. Now open the virtual folder and change the folders that it scans, removing the original folder and replacing it with the newsgroup folder:

Now the spam posts are hidden from this virtual folder:

You may need to specifically train the junk filter using a few junk and good messages in news. But the good news is that newsgroup spammers are not really optimizing against bayes filters, so it seems to be a lot easier to detect newsgroup spam than mail spam.

July 21, 2010 04:14 PM

As part of Mozilla's ongoing stability and security update process, SeaMonkey 2.0.6 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from www.seamonkey-project.org.

We strongly recommend that all SeaMonkey and old suite users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have SeaMonkey 2.0, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting "Check for Updates..." from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the SeaMonkey 2.0.6 Release Notes.

Note: All users of the outdated SeaMonkey 1.x, Mozilla or Netscape suites are encouraged to upgrade to SeaMonkey 2.0 by downloading it from www.seamonkey-project.org.

July 20, 2010 07:46 PM

A co-worker of mine was having problems remembering where the makefile puts the binary for Thunderbird when you build it yourself. Now, I type in the path far too often, so I know where it is (on my computer, anyways), but since I type it in far too often, I grabbed someone's zsh function that launched Firefox, and modified it to launch Thunderbird from either the build directory or the source directory, but only on Mac OS X.

Anyways, here it is, I hope some of you find it useful.

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thunderbird() {
  local -a currdir;
  currdir=$PWD:t;
  for nm in LanikaiDebug ShredderDebug Lanikai Shredder; do
    if [ -d "./mozilla/dist/$nm.app" ]; then
      ./mozilla/dist/$nm.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin $*
      break;
    elif [ -d "../objdir-$currdir/mozilla/dist/$nm.app" ]; then
      ../objdir-$currdir/mozilla/dist/$nm.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin $*
      break;
    fi
  done
}

July 19, 2010 02:20 PM

In a recent tb-planning post, neandr wrote:

With all respect for the people working at Mozilla/Thunderbird and fully understand the limitation they are faced with, I would like to see a more detailed mission statement for the products (TB/LG) and the future of it. Only expressing TB is for individual users, SOHO and not for the Enterprise is a very vague  statement

I was going to respond to that in the thread, but I got wordy so I posted this blog entry instead.

At the recently completed Mozilla Summit, variations of this request were made by many people that are close to the Thunderbird project (including myself). But after listening to several days of Firefox people extolling the virtues of moving everything to the browser, and being “more like the web”, I have a new appreciation of how difficult the development of a vision statement is for the Thunderbird team.

The standard game plan that Mozilla projects are expected to follow is to develop an application with a significantly high market share so that they can use their market influence to fight for the rights of individual users. Mozilla is a fascinating organization as a hybrid commercial/public interest organization, and they take their values quite seriously.

Unfortunately Thunderbird, which is the only real product that MoMo currently has, hovers around 6 million users, which is much lower than the number they believe are necessary to have the influence they would like (I have heard 100 million users as a goal). Nobody currently has a concrete plan to develop a product with 100 million users. So the current strategy (as I see it) is to try a series of experiments to try to develop some concepts that might be used to specify the 100 million user product. I can’t resist naming things (my wife calls me “an Adam”), so let’s call this future product by the code name “Gigabird”.

One such experiment is Raindrop. Other experiments are going on in extensions to Thunderbird, which seem to be focusing on changes to the user interface. Right now, that is where the vast majority of the developer resources are focused at MoMo.

So if your real strategic mission is to develop Gigabird, what do you do with your legacy product Thunderbird? The big problem is that the “ordinary users” that are the primary focus of Firefox (and by implication also MoMo) are migrating away from email for many forms of messaging to other media – Twitter, Facebook, text messages, web forums, blog comments, etc. The hardcore users of email (who are likely to continue to use a desktop client) are sitting in office cubicles, yet going after these “enterprise” users is counter-cultural for Mozilla.

So what are the strategic choices available to MoMo?

the HailMary

The goal here is to try to come up with one or more really clever innovations that will form the basis of Gigabird. This is, after all, the way that some of the new messaging formats have occurred, with Twitter as the poster child. Using these innovations as a base, the basic plan for Gigabird will be formulated at some point in the future. This is the current MoMo strategy, at least as I see it. Given the existing Mozilla culture, I would probably do this as well. (Warning: should this strategy every become publicly revealed, the director will disavow any knowledge of these actions.)

the AboutFace

Here you notice that the values-driven direction that you felt so passionate about is actually not going to get you anywhere, so you make a major readjustment in values to allow you to pragmatically accept a new direction. Such moves have been done by Mozilla in the past, and are part of the standard corporate Myth propagated by Mitchell Baker (the story about how in the early days they were adamant about never shipping a binary). The application to MoMo could be to accept that what they have is an email product, and their future users are going to be sitting in cubicles. Users in cubicles should have rights too, so there could be a valid Mozilla Foundation purpose in fighting for the rights of these “enterprise users” and let Thunderbird develop into an enterprise product.

the SlowPlod

This is the direction that existing Thunderbird users are hoping for. The ultimate goal is to slowly improve Thunderbird until it is undeniably the best email client around. You fix any important bugs.  You support all of the hot new messaging concepts. You spiff up the user interface, incrementally adding new features that provide small improvements to usability. You keep your power uses happy with lots of extensions for specialized purposes. It’s pretty clear that dmose does not believe that he has sufficient resources to pursue this strategy, nor is he likely to have them in the foreseeable future. The Thunderbird code base is also really hard to adapt to these new media (witness the struggles that I have had or jcranmer’s blog ). I think that the MoMo team wishes us well, but believes that the future lies elsewhere.

the VacuumTube

Just because you can’t change the direction of humanity does not mean that you have nothing. Vacuum tubes are long gone – yet the guitar player at my church proudly uses his fancy amp with glowing tubes showing through plexiglass. The company that bought one of my previous businesses had also previously purchased a manufacturer of vacuum tubes, which had morphed into specialized purposes like lamps for spectroscopy, and nuclear-warfare-resistant cathode ray tubes. Email clients will be with us forever, and in the hands of people who love them could have a useful future in various niches.

My Prediction

MoMo will pursue the HailMary until they have enough ideas to formulate a real plan. At that point, they will want to devote all of their resources to Gigabird, and be looking for an honorable way to retreat from Thunderbird – which will be a variation of the VacuumTube. The likely retreat will probably be some sort of future custodianship by a conglomeration of companies that provide a freemium strategy. So if there was a basic, free Thunderbird product that could be enhanced with addons with commercial value (like my Exchange Web Services product, or Postbox as a Thunderbird addon), then MoMo could pursue their vision without abandoning their Thunderbird users, and let companies like MesQuilla and Postbox support Thunderbird.

July 16, 2010 12:58 AM

I can now send a message through Exchange server from my Thunderbird installation.

Perhaps it would be interesting to show how I hooked into the sending function in the user interface. I asked the usual suspects, and it was not clear to anyone that it could be done without adding backend hooks – which I would like to avoid as much as possible to increase my chances of getting some initial alphas of this released to work with existing TB 3.1 users.

It turned out to be fairly straight forward. In MsgComposeCommands.js there is an observer notification that occurs, called “mail:composeOnSend”. This occurs right before the UI is ready to call SendMsg on the nsIMsgCompose object gMsgCompose. So what I needed to do was to intercept that call, and implement my own version of SendMsg rather than the SMTP/Rfc822-focused standard C++ code. To do that, I create a new object when I receive the notification with the old object as its prototype, then include a custom SendMsg that only applies if the sending account is an Exchange server. The overlay code ends up looking like this (greatly simplified):

function observe(subject, topic, data) {
 // wrap the gMsgCompose object so that we can detect attempts to
 //  send using ews.
 let newCompose = new ewsCompose(gMsgCompose);
 gMsgCompose = newCompose;
}

// ewsCompose provides a wrapper around the compose object, so that we
//  can override functions.
function ewsCompose(oldCompose) {
 this.oldCompose = oldCompose;
 this.SendMsg = function ewsSendMsg
     (msgType, identity, currentAccountKey, msgWindow, progress) {
   if (incomingServer instanceof Ci.msqIEwsIncomingServer) {
     // sending using Exchange Web Services (details not shown)
     // ...
     ewsCompose.sendMsg();
     return;
   }
   else
     return this.oldCompose.SendMsg
       (msgType, identity, currentAccountKey, msgWindow, progress);
 }
 this.__proto__ = oldCompose;
}

This seems to work just fine. It was a little tricky getting the compose code to believe that I had actually sent the message, so it could quit complaining of an unsent message. What I ended up doing in my “sending succeeded” callback is to add a few shutdown calls:

let ewsEventListener = {
  // msqIEwsEventListener implementation
  onEvent: function onEvent(aItem, aEvent, aData, aResult) {
    if (aEvent == 'StopRequest') {
      // ewsProgress was saved from the "progress" variable
      //   in nsMsgComposeCommands.js
      if (ewsProgress)
        ewsProgress.closeProgressDialog(aResult == Cr.NS_OK ? false : true);
      stateListener.ComposeProcessDone(aResult);
      MsgComposeCloseWindow(true);
    }
  }
}

With the ability now to send and receive messages, I’ve completed a single vertical pass through all of the key functionality. There are many, many details that I have passed over in the process. But it’s time to start thinking about what I would need to make work to get a usable alpha release of this, perhaps in about six weeks.

July 15, 2010 09:33 PM

If you look at mozilla's crash reported and peek at the crashes Thunderbird get, you'll see that the number of crashes is very low on Linux. That's because people use the packaged version of Thunderbird on Linux which is slightly different from the official release one (so they don't give us build symbols and disable the crash reporter). So from a QA and dev perspective we are loosing a lot of crash information , because we think we have a good Linux installed base. This is about to change, as one of the Major Linux distribution (SUSE Linux and it's sister openSUSE) are about to send us all those crashes that are happening. This won't be in the 11.3 releases per-se, but it will be from any update package that user will install from now on. Thanks Wolfir for making this happen !

July 15, 2010 08:29 AM

As some people may have already noticed, trunk builds (currently called version 3.2a1pre) of Thunderbird have been missing for the last couple of weeks. This is because the builds were broken by the xpcom component registration changes that recently landed.

The good news is, we’ve now fixed up all the breakage (well apart from getting one set of unit tests running again) and nightly builds will be going again from today.

For add-on authors supporting trunk, if you register your components, then you need to update your registration methods. There’s some good documentation on the MDC for how to do this.

July 14, 2010 08:46 AM

After months of development and a few pre-release versions, we are happy to announce that Instantbird 0.2 is now ready to be put in the hands of the general public.

Instantbird 0.2 is now available in 5 languages thanks to the great work of our translators.

If you have tried Instantbird 0.1 back in 2007 when it was first released, Instantbird 0.2 may feel like a completely different software to you. The most dramatically changed area is the conversation window (for example, new tabs and message styles), but there are notable changes in almost every window. For a list of changes, see the release notes.

Let's stop talking, so that you can discover Instantbird 0.2 now!

In the next few days, we will talk about our plans for the future, and especially Instantbird 0.3. Stay tuned!

July 13, 2010 03:10 PM

I came back from the Mozilla 2010 summit be more like the web edition, two days ago. I'm now still fighting jet-lag but doing way better than yesterday :-). This was a awsome great meeting. I've met a bunch of very interesting people (some of which will unfortunately get spammed on some bugs) working on plenty of position at mozilla. It was nice to finally meet some of the people I've been interacting with online in the last year and a half (Hi , Wayne, rkent, Gary, Archeopteryx, Neil ....). And I ended up having a bunch of very interesting conversations with our contributors. I probably ended up spending too much time with the French contributors (that I've known through previous events like FOSDEM), playing belote contrée. I hadn't play the game for quite a while so no regrets at all. I had setup a PGP and CAcert signing meet. PGP went well as 15 people came and participated while CAcert , only some assurers (not even all of them) showed up.

I'd like to thank all the people who did a amazing job preparing and organizing the summit - it was perfect !

Ho and yes I did make a few pictures while there :

July 13, 2010 11:02 AM

• Places-based bookmarks
• Lightweight Themes (Personas)
  
• Data Manager
  

• The Add-on Manager has been rewritten and now opens within a new tab or browser window. Read Mossop's blog for more information.
• The video back-end now supports WebM/VP8 (use yasm if compiling on Linux!).
  
• The Troubleshooting Information page (about:support), which features a short-hand for accessing your profile folder, can now be opened from the Help menu (not the Tools menu, as mentioned in the 2.1 Alpha 1 Roundup).
• The Download Manager now allows your to drag files and URLs to and from it, e.g. to the desktop or Explorer window.
• The View Source window includes a Find Bar now, like the one in the Help viewer and Firefox, but at the top of the window.
  
• The MailNews components now supports saving multiple messages as individual files in a directory.
• The MailNews thread pane and other trees now feature alternating backgrounds on Mac and Linux.
  
• The MailNews Search toolbar is gone, in favor of elements that can be used in customizable toolbars. The bar might eventually return (cf. Thunderbird's Quick Filter bar), but for now its elements have been moved to an own, full-sized toolbar (which can of course be disabled and all its elements be moved to other toolbars).
• The Search and Go browser buttons are customizable now, too.
  
• Gopher is gone.
  

• OOPP prerequisite: Convert mailnews to frozen/external linkages (Bug 377319)
• Windows 7 taskbar support prerequisite: Support setting AppUserModelID per top level window (Bug 560846)

• Process attachments with "Content-Type:" line containing a line break properly (Bug 543813)
• Fix reordering of newsgroups using drag & drop: Port d&d code from TB, introducing Services.jsm to SeaMonkey MailNews (Bug 556887)
• Fix getting POP3 mail after resuming from sleep mode (Bug 466933)
• Format large numbers in main window message size (Bug 516787)
• Do not retry IMAP move copies since that most likely will result in duplicates (Bug 403603)
• Make sure HTML editor does not delete lines below Return on certain emails composed in Outlook 2003 (Bug 554806)
• Make sure irregular message updates header pane on message view ('undisclosed-recipients' should show up) (Bug 549931)
• Fix crash when POP3 server closed connection while trying to show a password prompt (Bug 556249)
  
• Fix saving IMAP drafts offline on Windows (Bug 397910)
• Fix accessing third account and local mail (Bug 397744)
• Add ability to save multiple messages as individual files in directory (Bug 555972)
• Use custom icon for Go -> Local Folders -> Outbox (Bug 475509)
• Make Search, Folder Location and Views widgets for MailNews customizable toolbars (Bug 521927)
• Prompt for client certificate password when making TLS connection to IMAP server (Bug 568929)
• Make message copy action to IMAP on incoming POP3 mail succeed with quarantining turned on for antivirus (Bug 387361)
• Make replay of offline IMAP operations succeed if the network connection is down when going online (Bug 567773)
• Make sure signature of previously selected account is removed when switching between accounts (Bug 566825)
• Remove duplicate certificate in chain from S/MIME signed emails (Bug 354273)
• Use correct date for mail imported from Outlook Sent folder (avoid timezone confusion) (Bug 309932)
• Make the internal archiving code work for any set of messages, thus being nicer to extensions (Bug 570578)
• Make archiving of read-only folders do a copy, not a move (Bug 573278)
• Rename "Unsent Messages" to "Outbox" (Bug 475511)
• Alert undoing IMAP delete (Bug 571800)
• Do not crash when subscribed to IMAP folder '/' (Bug 562104)
• Restore ability to save or detach IMAP attachments (Bug 572065)
• Add ability to open mork DBs asynchronously (Bug 570582)
• Handle multiline subject headers that contain CR+HTAB instead of CR+SPC correctly (Bug 460443)

• Make Mailing List dialog resizable (Bug 534831)
• Use instead of spacers to align the labels in the Mailing List dialog header sections (Bug 555452)

• Make downloads work if temporary directory is encrypted on Windows (Bug 199473)
• Add possibility to drag URL/file to/from SeaMonkey's Download Manager (copy/move to desktop/folder) (Bug 192728)
• Make downloads list honor Always Remember Helper Application (Bug 569898)
• Avoid disk cache overflow when downloading large files (Bug 443067)
• Honor browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone pref (Windows policy settings integration) (Bug 569204)

• Update Modern theme for HTML5 video controls CSS transition (Bug 558746)
• Add libvpx VP8 decoding library / WebM (Bug 566247)
• Add HTMLMediaElement.canPlayType support for WebM (Bug 566245)
• Implement a raw video decoder (Bug 508082)
• Increase the default media cache size from 50MB to 500MB (Bug 572235)

• Do not write sessionstore.js to disk for read-only events (Bug 558646)
• Restore windows at the saved position without moving them around on the screen (Bug 558641)
• Allow 3rd party cookies for session only (Bug 565475)
• Change default to allow third party session cookies (Bug 570630)
• Make sure that the Location Bar does not stop working and not allow any input (Bug 567655)
• Make sure no tabs are stuck in zombie mode (Bug 558996)

• Replace "Download retention" with "Download history" in Browser preferences [ (Bug 566484)
• Add new Add-on Manager UI preferences (Bug 554007, Bug 561600)
• Remove extensions.getMore* preferences (Bug 530102)
• Add a pref to disable accelerated layers by force (Bug 565387)

• Show jemalloc stats in about:memory on Linux (Bug 557935)
• Make changes to the GTK widget to support GL accelerated rendering (Bug 565833)
• Implement OpenType font shaping using HarfBuzz and provide a pref to use this or platform back-end (Bug 449292)

• Remove splitter cursor overrides (Bug 558668)

• Disable the Get Certificate button on the Certificate exception dialog when the certificate is being retrieved in the background (Bug 523742)

• Add build option "--with-debug-label" (Bug 565191)
• Allow a single option to control tag/revision to pull in client.py (Bug 556394)
• Require system libpng to be at version 1.4.1 or later (Bug 551438)
• Add jemalloc support for Windows x64 build (VC 2005 / 2008) (Bug 521193)

• Implement input type="tel" (Bug 557620)
• Implement input type="search" (Bug 456229)
• Implement autofocus attribute (Bug 546995)
• Implement control attribute for label element (Bug 562932)
• Implement the accept attribute for the form and file upload controls form "image/*" (Bug 377624)
• Let select size default to 4 when 'multiple' attribute is present (Bug 551846)
• Remove support for table@align=abscenter/absmiddle/middle (Bug 559834)
• Enable Web Sockets (Bug 472529)

• Rename -moz-background-size to background-size. (Bug 549809)
• Add support for background-clip and background-origin in the background shorthand (Bug 549809)
• Add -moz-background-clip: content (Bug 549809)
• Remove -moz- prefix from (-moz-background-origin|-moz-background-clip|-moz-background-size) (Bug 570939)

• Make site icons work in Places (History window for now, bookmarks once switched) (Bug 554908)
• Highlight odd tree rows in trees with multiple columns in Gnomestripe and Pinstripe themes. Implement and use ::-moz-tree-row(multicol) (Bug 282127)
• Implement new Add-on Manager UI for SeaMonkey (about:addons) (Bug 561600)
• Add notification bar hook for new Add-on Manager (Bug 561600)
• Make notification bars open the Add-on Manager in browser rather than its own window (Bug 572049)
• Catch and handle nicely 'malformed URI sequence' when migrating passwords from the legacy storage to the new (Bug 530079)
• Open the Add-on Manager in a tab (Bug 566905)
• Add about:support (Troubleshooting Information page), including Help menu item (Bug 545110)
• Use D3D9 layers back-end as the preferred hardware back-end for Windows (Bug 546515)
• Do not copy elements with visibility:hidden, visibility:collapse, or display:none to the clipboard (Bug 39098)
• Enable Cleartype content rendering by default on Windows XP (Bug 504698)
• Overlay Suite features onto Toolkit View Source window and use that instead of an own implementation (Bug 411754)
• Make View Source optionally open in text/plain helper application (ExternalViewSource) (Bug 8589)
• Disable forcing on Cleartype for system fonts for now (Bug 504698)
• Make sure non-ASCII characters are decoded correctly after using Customize on a toolbar (Bug 479107)
• Implement Unicode Ideographic Variation Sequence (IVS) support in Windows font back-end (Bug 552460)
• Increase the maximum number of disk cache entries from 8192 to 16384 (Bug 175600)
  
• Implement core support for RFC-2597/2598/3168 Quality-of-Service (DSCP) marking (Bug 529921)
• Enable relimit (JavaScript RegExp-related) by default and find out if it breaks the Web (Bug 452451)
• Port GetDefaultFeedReader to SeaMonkey shell service (Bug 471346)
• Do not show website favicon during toolbar customisation (Bug 569318)
• Remove navigator.preference (Bug 568059)
• Make sure a web page generated by POST is not retried as GET when Save Frame As is used and the page is no longer in the cache (Bug 485196)
• Add support for STIX Fonts 1.0 to MathML (Bug 569195)
• Make sure carret does not disappear when clicking in an empty contenteditable element that has focus (Bug 550434)
• Allow listing directories on Sysax FTP server (Bug 523127)
• Deliver a better English language dictionary (Bug 479334)
• Remove Gopher support (Bug 388195)
• Stop reading/writing xpti.dat and incrementally loading XPT files (Bug 570488)
• Prevent Customize toolbar sheet from moving when selecting the show dropdown menu (Bug 566424)
• Implement Firefox TabBrowser API: loadTabs(), loadOneTab() and change addTab() to get feature parity (Bug 558614)
• Implement Firefox TabBrowser API: getIcon() (Bug 558673)
• Make Search and Go buttons widgets for browser customizable toolbar (Bug 529647)
• Use transparent resizer images (Bug 554810)
• Make copying/pasting lists not add # in plain text mode (Bug 365805)
• Use the uninstall.log to uninstall the previous version before installing when upgrading an existing install (Bug 367539)

July 11, 2010 11:48 PM

Context menus (opened with a "right click") are a common and expected part of the user interface. It can be very frustrating when they are missing, so in Instantbird 0.2 we tried to add one wherever users are likely to expect one.

In the buddy list, the context menu of contacts can be used to start a conversation (although pressing enter or double clicking is usually faster), show the conversation history, rename a contact, move the contact to a different group or remove it from the list:

The context menu is usable anywhere in the buddy list to toggle the display of offline buddies:

A context menu was added in the account manager too. There, it proposes all the possible actions for an account. Since Instantbird 0.2, it's possible to reorder the accounts in the list (this is also possible with drag & drop using the mouse or with the keyboard using shift + the up or down arrow).

A context menu is available on conversation tabs, with actions related to that tab (opening it in a new window, closing it, ...) and to the conversation, like showing the history of previous conversations with the same contact.

Last but not least, there's a context menu in conversation content. This is the most "contextual" context menu we have added. The proposed actions will vary depending on whether there is a selection or if the context click was done over a link.

When selecting some text from a conversation, a common action is to copy it to the clipboard and then paste it in a browser to use it as the query in search engine. We have included search engine items directly in the context menus to reduce the number of clicks needed for this common case.

July 11, 2010 05:04 PM

SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 2, the second preview milestone on the way to the future of Mozilla's SeaMonkey Internet suite, is now available for free download. Please note that this pre-release version is still intended for developers and testers only. As always, we appreciate any feedback you may have and encourage users to help us by filing bugs.

The new improvements of this developer preview compared to the last one include:

• New add-ons manager.
• WebM video support.
• Customizable toolbar elements now include Search, Folder Location and Mail Views on the messaging as well as Search and Go on the browser side.
• Download Manager supports drag and drop now.
• View Source windows are more consistent with each other and the rest of the suite.
• The system's default feed reader can now be detected and used where appropriate.

We welcome any and all discussions on this alpha on our newsgroups, or you can even file a bug if you find one. Be sure to check our Known Issues prior to filing bugs.

SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 2 is available for free download on the SeaMonkey website. Once you have downloaded and installed this release, we'd like to encourage you to get involved in discussing and reporting problems as well as further improving the product.

Thanks for testing and helping us to make SeaMonkey even better!

July 07, 2010 11:09 PM

Welcome to our first release of the Mailing List Manager.

We started the Mailing List Manager add-on with a goal to help Thunderbird users find, organize, and manage messages from mailing lists. And as we’ve worked on it internally we feel like we’ve arrived at a pretty good milestone.

Now we need more help to make the mailing list manager a success. We’re looking to find issues with the current system, and answers to questions like:

• Are all of your mailing lists being detected correctly?
• Are your mailing list filters working?
• Are you able to find all your mailing list messages again?

This and other feedback will help us evaluate how this feature should work inside Thunderbird and if this feature should be included by default.

We’ll keep you updated with other posts right here about the Mailing List Manager as we update it, so keep checking back. If you’ve installed the add-on you’ll see the updates come as they are available.

So go read more about the Mailing List Manager, install the add-on, and make sure to watch the intro video.

July 07, 2010 10:08 PM

Due to Mozilla Summit Schedule changes SuMoMo meeting to 17:45 (from 17:15) and Support and QA meeting canceled. Meet in the lobby, look for Roland (Canadian of Filipino heritage) in an Orange hoody. Full SuMoMo meeting details on the wiki.

July 07, 2010 08:06 PM

A large number of Mozilla Staff including myself and a large number of Mozilla community contributors will be in Whistler this week from Tuesday afternoon or so  to Saturday (I arrive early Tuesday afternoon and then have to leave early Thursday night). We’re going to take advantage of this to have further meetings that I alluded to in my previous post about MozillaZine.

The two meetings are:

1. SuMoMo Non English Meeting - Proposed Time and Place: When: Wed July 7th, 17:15, meet in the lobby
2. QA & Support working hand in hand - Proposed Time and Place: When: Wed July 7th, 17:45, meet in the lobby

The times and place of the meetings are TENTATIVE. Stay tuned to the Summit informal meeting wiki page for last minute details or email me roland AT mozillamessaging.com or rolandtanglao on irc in #moz10.

July 05, 2010 11:09 PM

Until recently, development of new features in Thunderbird used a development style where initial versions created by a developer and designer would “land” in the the Thunderbird nightly releases and evolve based on feedback from those users.

Experience has showed us that while nightly users are very helpful in detecting unexpected bugs that show up unexpectedly, that nightly builds are not a great way to develop new user interface features. First, people using Thunderbird nightlies aren’t always interested in that specific feature, so any raw intermediate state makes their daily email experience less pleasant; second, there’s no commonly known mechanism for feedback on a specific feature, so while we may have many users, they often don’t know how to do anything except “file a bug”, which is great for bugs, but not great for user experience feedback; finally, we can only get feedback from people who are brave enough to try out builds that are not tested, which is a very non-representative population sample!

With the Quick Filter feature, we tried something different.

Right from the start, Quick Filter started out as an optional add-on to Thunderbird which was available to anyone running Thunderbird 3.0 or better. We used blogs, bugs, and an page on the Add-ons website to publicize and solicit feedback about the release of the add-on to a much better targeted audience.  We got lots of high quality feedback quickly, were able to create new revisions quickly, and generally made much faster progress.

After incorporating much of the feedback into the add-on the Thunderbird team felt it was ready to put into Thunderbird for everyone to use.  Only then did we take on some of the tasks that are required for production software (extensive unit tests, better code documentation, etc.).  By separating the iterative, user experience-focused and feedback-gathering phase from the hardening phase, we were able to get to a highly usable, stable feature much faster.

The Quick Filter add-on is therefore the first of our “graduate” add-ons.  With this blog, we’re expanding from the process that we started with Quick Filter, and making it easier for more interested testers to get involved.

July 05, 2010 09:54 PM

• A new plugin: order -- it ensures that scripts are fetched asynchronously and in parallel, but executed in the order specified in the call to require(). Ideal for traditional browser scripts that do not participate in modules defined via calls to require.def().
• Web Worker support. RequireJS can be used in a web worker.
• Multiple module names can now be mapped via the paths config option to the same URL, and that URL will only be fetched once.
• Added Firefox 2 to supported browsers. Safari 3.2 also works with require().
• Bug fixes.

July 05, 2010 05:19 AM

HTML and CSS provide awesome layout potential, but harnessing that potential to do your bidding can sometimes be problematic.  I suspect all people who have written HTML documents have been in a situation where they have randomly permuted the document structure and CSS of something that should work in the hopes of evolving it into something that actually does work.  Matching wits with a black box that is invulnerable to even pirate-grade profanity is generally not a pleasant experience.

It turns out gecko has a way to let you see inside that black box.  Well, actually, multiple ways.  There’s a layout debugger (that seems broken on trunk?) that can display visual overlays for box sizes/events/reflow counts, dump info about paints/invalidations/events as they happen as well as dumping the current content tree and frames.  Even better, gecko’s frame reflow debugging mechanism will dump most of the inputs and outputs of each stage of reflow calculations as they happen.  With some comparatively minor patches[1] we can augment this information so that we can isolate reflow decisions to their origin presentation shell/associated URL and so that we know the tag name, element id, and class information on HTML nodes subjected to reflow calculations.  A reasonably sane person would want to do this if they were planning to be doing a lot of potentially complicated HTML layout work and would a) benefit from better understanding how layout actually works, b) not want to propagate layout cargo culting or its ilk from the code being replaced, c) not want to waste days of their lives later the next time this happens, d) help locate and fix layout bugs if bugs they be so that all might benefit.

Of course, with logs that effectively amount to execution traces, examining them by hand is frequently intractable unless you really know what you’re looking for or are dealing with a toy example.  My non-reduced problem case resulted in 58,107 lines, for one.  So writing a tool is a good idea, and writing it in JS using Jetpack doubly so.

In any event, the problem is I am trying to use the flexible box model to create an area of the screen that takes up as much space as possible.  In this space I want to be able to house a virtual scrolling widget so I use “overflow: hidden”.  Regrettably, when my logic goes to populate the div, the box ends up resizing itself and now the whole page wants to scroll.  Very sad.  (Things work out okay with an explicitly sized box which is why my unit tests for the virtual scrolling widget pass…)

Let’s formulate a query on the div of interest (which I will conceal) and then see what the first little bit of output is:

*** Box 24 tag:div id: classes:default-bugzilla-ui-bug-page-runBox
*** scroll 25 tag:div id: classes:default-bugzilla-ui-bug-page-runs
scroll 25 variant 1  (parent 24) first line 406
  why: GetPrefSize
  inputs: boxAvail: 0,UC
          boxLast: 0,0
          reflowAvailable: 0,UC
          reflowComputed: 0,UC
          reflowExtra: dirty v-resize
  output: prefWidth: 0
          minWidth: 0
          reflowDims: 0,0
          prefSize: 0,0
          minSize: 0,0
          maxSize: UC,UC
  parent concluded: minSize: 0,0
                    maxSize: UC,UC
                    prefSize: 2,0
scroll 25 variant 2  (parent 24) first line 406
  why: Layout
  inputs: boxAvail: 771,1684
          boxLast: 0,0
          reflowAvailable: 771,UC
          reflowComputed: 771,1684
          reflowExtra: dirty dirty-children h-resize v-resize
  output: prefSize: 0,0
          minSize: 0,0
          maxSize: UC,UC
          reflowDims: 771,1684
          layout: 2,0,771,1684
  parent concluded: minSize: 0,0
                    maxSize: UC,UC
                    prefSize: 0,0
                    layout: 0,0,773,1684

This is the general pattern we will see to the reflows.  The parent will ask it what size it wants to be and it will usually  respond with “ridiculously wide but not so tall”.  (Not in this first base case, but the next one responds with a prefsize of “1960,449″, and that’s pixels.) The parent will then perform layout and say “no, you need to be taller than you want to be”, at least until I start cramming stuff in there.

So we skim down the output to find out where things first went off the rails…

scroll 25 variant 16  (parent 24) first line 20548
  why: GetPrefSize
  inputs: boxAvail: 1960,UC
          boxLast: 771,1686
          reflowAvailable: 1960,UC
          reflowComputed: 1960,UC
          reflowExtra: dirty-children h-resize v-resize
  output: prefWidth: 1960
          minWidth: 352
          reflowDims: 1960,1755
          prefSize: 1960,1755
          minSize: 352,1755
          maxSize: UC,UC
  parent concluded: minSize: 0,0
                    maxSize: UC,UC
                    prefSize: 1962,1755
scroll 25 variant 17  (parent 24) first line 20548
  why: Layout
  inputs: boxAvail: 771,1755
          boxLast: 1960,1755
          reflowAvailable: 771,UC
          reflowComputed: 771,1755
          reflowExtra: dirty-children h-resize
  output: prefSize: 0,0
          minSize: 352,1755
          maxSize: UC,UC
          reflowDims: 771,1755
          layout: 2,0,771,1755
  parent concluded: minSize: 0,0
                    maxSize: UC,UC
                    prefSize: 0,0
                    layout: 0,0,773,1755

Okay, that looks pretty likely to be the area of concern.  The parent asked it for its ideal size, so it told it, but then the parent apparently decided to enlarge itself too.  That is not what we wanted.  We would have been cool if just the scroll #25 enlarged itself (or its block child #26 that corresponds to the same content node but which I have elided because it always says the same thing as its parent #25) since some frame needs to end up holding the overflow coordinate space.

Thus concludes part 1 of our exciting saga.  In part 2, we hopefully figure out what the problem is and how to fix it.  Lest anyone suggest the root problem is that I am completely off base and am not remotely reasonably sane for choosing this as a strategy to solve the problem… it works in chrome.  Which is not to say that my html/css is correct and firefox’s layout is wrong; it’s quite possible for layout engines to err or deal with unspecified behaviour cases in my favor, after all.  But it does make me want to understand what the layout engine is thinking and be able to do so with a minimum of effort in the future, since I doubt this is the last time I will not immediately understand the problem or that layout engines will differ in their behaviour.

For those who want to play along at home: the raw gzip’d /tmp/framedebug file (gunzip to /tmp/framedebug) that is the entirety of the trunk firefox log with debug output, the spliced output just for the one window derived from an invocation of “cfx run splice” (it will show up under the URL in /tmp/framedumps), and the output of the output of “cfx run summarize serial-12-0 summarize unique 22,24,25,26.  Those unique identifiers are deterministic but arbitrary values for the given file.  We discovered them by using the query on the CSS class using “cfx run summarize serial-12-0 summarize class wlib-wlib-virt-wlib-virt-container-root”.  The hg repo for the processing tool is here, the mozilla-central patches are: first and second.  A minor jetpack patch is also required for the command line stuff to work.

1: I was initially trying to avoid patching anything.  This didn’t work out, but it did cause the initial log file splicing logic to leverage the arena allocation scheme of presentation shells to allow us to to map frames back to their URLs.  Sadly, it turned out the arena allocation blocks requested from the upstream allocators are really small (4k or 1k) and all from the same source and so I had to instrument the allocation as well as adding debug output of the window/docshell/presshell linkages.  The output adds an unacceptable additional level of noise to the default DEBUG case; the right thing to do is likely to cause the reflow log debugging to emit the document URL before each logging outburst if it is different from the last outburst.

July 04, 2010 05:51 AM

So I've finally picked dates and time for both the CAcert event and the PGP signing party add , these to your summit agenda. Both event will be held on July 8th 2010. Both event will have the same meeting point. The hotel lobby's front desk.

• PGP signing will start at 11:30 (please add your key to the keyring before coming)


• CAcert will be at 13:45

July 03, 2010 08:22 AM

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 mailnews codebase. Instead, I decided to implement a local storage scheme based on SQLite and Mozilla’s Storage interface. Andrew Sutherland has done a lot of great work setting up an environment similar to this for the gloda database, so there are lots of good examples to pull from. Also, because the datamodel for EWS includes not only messages but also Calendar and Contact items, I can have a common database infrastucture that I can leverage over those other pieces once I get it working for the messaging part.

I’ve now replaced my previous in-memory datastore for message metadata with an SQLite version. This is equivalent to the datastore module in gloda, and the data it is storing is like the RFC-822 headers. I still have to do the storage for the body, and also hook this up with folder change state so that the code knows that it has data it can trust.

As I have done this, I’ve had a new set of insights into the relationship of the various objects in the Mozilla mailnews world (which I sometimes call Skink). Previously, I had sort of expected that the natural progression of gloda would be to slowly displace the role of the message summary database, nsIMsgDBHdr.  But now I see that a more natural progression would be for SQLite to be used as a replacement for the local mailstore (currently mbox, with maildir support moving forward as well.) Really the main issue is the async nature of the SQLite calls, which sort of precludes its easy use as a replacement for nsIMsgDBHdr. But the datastores are typically accessed async anyway. If the message metadata in the message stores was stored primarily in SQLite format, as I will be doing, then it would be much easier to hookup an SQLite-based global search facility to all of these databases. Yes that is what gloda does now, but it has to go through all of the work to maintain a separate version of everything. Why have three copies of everything (Mork, MBox, and Gloda) when you could only have two (Mork and Gloda)?

As another insight, while looking through the gloda code I noticed that a JSON object was being saved to store some of the items. I though that was a good idea at first – but then I tried to write a simple serializer to convert from my internal native format to JSON objects, and saw that it was not going to be an easy project. But then I remembered that SOAP is really just a mechanism to serialize typed objects, and I already have a SOAP encoder and decoder! So instead of using JSON, I use objects serialized with my SOAP XML encoder to store unindexed items in my SQLite store. So a message (sans body) ends up looking like this as a TEXT item in SQLite:

<Message xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/types">
 <Subject>Postini First Junk Email Safely Quarantined</Subject>
 <DateTimeReceived>2010-06-04T22:19:30Z</DateTimeReceived>
 <Size>2612</Size>
 <Importance>Normal</Importance>
 <DisplayTo>Kent James</DisplayTo>
 <Culture>en-US</Culture>
 <Sender>
  <Mailbox>
   <Name>Postini Support</Name>
   <EmailAddress>noreply@hostedmsexchange.com</EmailAddress>
   <RoutingType>SMTP</RoutingType>
  </Mailbox>
 </Sender>
 <ToRecipients>
  <Mailbox>
   <Name>Kent James</Name>
   <EmailAddress>rkentjames@caspia.org</EmailAddress>
   <RoutingType>SMTP</RoutingType>
  </Mailbox>
 </ToRecipients>
 <From>
  <Mailbox>
   <Name>Postini Support</Name>
   <EmailAddress>noreply@hostedmsexchange.com</EmailAddress>
   <RoutingType>SMTP</RoutingType>
  </Mailbox>
 </From>
 <InternetMessageId>&lt;0c34b5a4-5f3c-4654-bf9d-99c9a8cb439b@HUB02.4emm.local&gt;
 </InternetMessageId>
 <IsRead>1</IsRead>
</Message>

At first it bothered me to save what is essentially a duplicate of what is coming over the wire, but why not? It’s not conceptually any different than RFC-822, or JSON, in function.

June 25, 2010 10:55 PM

The Calendar Project is proud to report, that (finally) the 1.0 beta2 release of Lightning has been completed and is now available via addons.mozilla.org.

About 6 months after 1.0b1, we have managed to complete 86 further bugfixes and improvements for the benefit of our users. Notable improvements for this release are:

• You can now print out your tasks
• Improved calendar view navigation, performance improved
• Better error handling when adding or subscribing to calendars
• Allow setting different start and end timezones for events and tasks
• CalDAV support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers have been improved
• Performance improvement and reduced network load when accessing certain CalDAV servers (webdav-sync specification)
• The application stability, performance and memory consumption have been improved

Lightning 1.0 beta2 is available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 35 different languages including English. Please read the release notes for Lightning 1.0 beta2 before downloading.

Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. We would not be able to do this without your assistance!

June 25, 2010 06:18 AM

If you haven’t already seen it, we’ve just released Thunderbird 3.1.

Go read the website for what its got in it, some nice new changes, including (but not limited to!) an improved quick filter bar, better migration assistant and the non-modal return receipt prompt.

June 24, 2010 07:30 PM

As part of Mozilla's ongoing stability and security update process, SeaMonkey 2.0.5 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from www.seamonkey-project.org.

We strongly recommend that all SeaMonkey and old suite users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have SeaMonkey 2.0, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting "Check for Updates..." from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the SeaMonkey 2.0.5 Release Notes.

Note: All users of the outdated SeaMonkey 1.x, Mozilla or Netscape suites are encouraged to upgrade to SeaMonkey 2.0 by downloading it from www.seamonkey-project.org.

June 23, 2010 03:18 AM

This new release candidate contains fixes for a few locales, no further code changes. Since the Thunderbird 3.1 release is scheduled for this week, I assume this will be the final release candidate.

Candidate builds for Lightning 1.0 beta2 in 33 languages are available as of now for:

• Windows
• Linux (32 bit)
• Linux (64 bit, contributed build)
• Mac OS X

A corresponding build of the Provider for Google Calendar is also available at those locations and will be uploaded to addons.mozilla.org once the release cycle completes.

For install instructions, please see one of the earlier blog posts.

Please tell us what you think of these candidate builds and file bugs in Bugzilla as you go. The release is near, and we are glad we can finally concentrate on the next one!

June 21, 2010 07:15 AM

Yesterday our build team finished the initial round of work for providing Thunderbird with 64-bit nightly builds on Linux. These are being provided for trunk (3.2a1pre builds only).

As with all nightly builds, these should be considered experimental, and are based on the very latest source code. Automatic updates should be forthcoming, though I have to admit at the time of writing we haven’t verified that yet.

We’ve also set up unit test builders on the Thunderbird trunk and Thunderbird 3.0 tinderbox trees. Thunderbird 3.1 is still to come - we’ve currently got some unexplained compilation issues there.

We haven’t yet decided when we’ll start releasing 64-bit builds with releases, we’ll determine that over the next few months.

The nightlies are available in the normal place, located here.

June 18, 2010 09:25 AM

Typography on computers has improved tremendously in the last ten years. Microsoft came out with ClearType with Windows XP (spurring endless debates about whether Apple’s or Microsoft’s sub-pixel rendering technology is better), and then with an amazing set of typefaces with Windows Vista. Meanwhile, Apple’s done its own share of shipping new typefaces in OS releases. And most Linux distributions now ship the excellent DejaVu typefaces.

Thunderbird, however, hasn’t kept up at all, despite the fact that its primary job is to display text to you. On Windows, it still uses the ancient Times New Roman and Courier New fonts, even though Microsoft itself has moved on.

Thunderbird 3 on Windows 7 next to Mozilla Suite 1.0 on Windows 98: spot the difference

This is all about to change. Starting Thunderbird 3.1 beta 2, the default typefaces for emails in Unicode and Western encodings have changed from:

Windows Vista and 7

• Proportional: Times New Roman to Calibri
• Monospace: Courier New to Consolas

Mac OS X

• Proportional: Times to Lucida Grande
• Monospace: Courier to Menlo on Snow Leopard and later, Monaco otherwise

Linux

• Proportional: System default serif typeface to DejaVu Sans system default sans-serif typeface
• Monospace: System default monospace typeface to DejaVu Sans Mono hasn’t been changed

These typefaces provide a fresh, modern look to Thunderbird, and make the experience of reading email that much better.

A comparison of the old and new defaults on Windows and Mac

Unfortunately, we don’t have a solution for Windows XP yet, mainly because ClearType isn’t enabled by default and neither are ClearType typefaces always available. There’s a bug on file to upgrade Windows XP users to something better than the current defaults.

Thanks to Alex Faaborg for first suggesting the idea of changing the default fonts, dmose for driving it over the line, Mossop for suggesting the defaults on Mac, and Blake and Bryan for reviewing it in time ;)

I’d also like to thank Gurpartap for allowing me access to his Mac server over VNC to take screenshots. (No thanks to Apple for making connecting to Snow Leopard Server from a non-Apple computer a PITA, though.)

Update: The Linux defaults have been reverted to whatever the system specifies.

Update 2: Patricia Clausnitzer from PC has kindly provided a Belorussian translation of this post.

June 17, 2010 09:09 PM

A few people have asked me different compatibility questions around Lightning 1.0b2. I'd like to take a moment and tell you about what applications Lightning 1.0b2 will support.

What version(s) of Thunderbird will Lightning 1.0b2 support?
This version of Lightning will only support Thunderbird 3.1. To go a bit more into the technical details, Lightning 1.0b2 and Thunderbird 3.1 use the Mozilla Platform version 1.9.2. The previous versions (Lightning 1.0b1 / Thunderbird 3.0.x) use the Mozilla Platform version 1.9.1. Therefore we cannot provide a version of Lightning that is compatible with Thunderbird 3.0.x

Will Lightning 1.0b2 support Seamonkey?
As you can see in this blog post, Seamonkey does not support the Mozilla Platform version 1.9.2. Therefore, Lightning 1.0b2 cannot support Seamonkey 2.0 or 2.1. Note however, the next version of Lightning will most likely use the Mozilla 1.9.3 Platform, which means the next release (due in about 4 months) will be compatible with Seamonkey 2.1. Until then you can still use Lightning 1.0b1 together with Seamonkey 2.0.x.

Which version of the Provider for Google Calendar should I use?
Together with Lightning 1.0b2, I will release a new version of the Provider for Google Calendar. This version will be called 0.7 and will be available on addons.mozilla.org together with Lightning.

Why don't you use the latest Mozilla platform, verion 1.9.3?
The 1.9.3 platform contains the newest features and bugfixes to date, but this also means that some Mozilla components we use, as well as some UI features, have changed and require us to adapt our code. Changes in the platform can happen every day, which means it doesn't make sense to rely on it for a release. Just imagine something big changes between now and next week: this would postpone the release indefinitely, which is obviously bad. Another factor is that the newer platform has binary components that have a different interface. If we build Lightning with Mozilla 1.9.3, it won't be compatible with a Thunderbird on the Mozilla 1.9.2 platform. It makes sense to use the same Mozilla platform version that Thunderbird does, this causes the least amount of headaches.

Why are you releasing betas, and not 1.0 final?
There is a certain level of stability that people expect from such a major release such as 1.0. We have decided on a certain set of bugs that we think should be fixed before 1.0 final is released. Back when we released 1.0b1, we had a few possibilities on what we should name it. There was 0.10 (as in 0.8, 0.9, 0.10, ...), but people could think this is similarly mature as 0.1 was. There was 0.9.5, but we wanted to make clear that the Mozilla platform used has a different minor version (1.8.x vs 1.9.x). So we ended up with 1.0b1. Now we have no other choice than to continue with betas until we've fixed all the bugs we think make sense for 1.0 final.

I hope this gives a bit of insight, if you have any further questions, please comment!

June 17, 2010 08:21 AM


View on Vimeo.

This is a blog post outlining a proposed alternative layout for the Raindrop inflow and conversation reader. Check out the video above (I suggest fullscreen HD) for a screencast of the proposed layout, then hit the jump for more details.

While developing and designing the current Raindrop Inflow we put a lot of focus on pulling out useful information such as links, videos, attachments, and images - all things that would create a richer reading experience in the inflow. At a certain point though I wanted to take a step back from this and really make sure that the experience of actually reading would be enhanced in Raindrop. Ease of reading was after all going to be most important part of a messaging interface.

I started out by tidying up the layout into a strict 960px grid, which was then divided into 6 columns to house the content.

full size

full size

Immediately the organizational benefits became apparent. Information became easier to find, and things were looking more consistent. I removed almost all the images from the design (apart from the Raindrop word mark), and went with a pure css approach. The design felt visually lighter, as well as the markup - no drop shadows, gradients, bevels or embosses to be found anywhere.

The grid also allowed us to implement the new full conversation reader, which I think is the biggest benefit of this design. Loading the full conversation in the second column lets us view both the inflow and the full conversation side by side, eliminating the need to navigate to a new page to view the full conversation. Big click targets that toggle the full conversation on and off make it very simple to get back to your inflow and main menu. Also coupled with keyboard navigation (J,K) this layout makes it extremely efficient to navigate through your messages.

full size

Lastly, the typography of the entire thing has been improved. The line length of messages in the inflow is around 50 characters, and the line length in the full conversation reader is roughly 80 characters at the most. According to the Elements of Typographic Style the ideal line length is 45-75 characters. The old inflow and conversation reader would have line lengths of over 100 characters, so I think this is a great improvement. Also, you might notice that the typeface has changed from Droid Sans to good old Helvetica.

June 15, 2010 06:22 PM

This blog post is a continuation of my previous two posts, which is being broken up into multiple segments to lower the amount of text one has to read in a single sitting. The current step is to actually implement the folder update.

Only new messages

Now that we know how to add messages to the database, we need to figure out how to find the downloaded messages.

It should go without saying that checking to see if you actually need to update the folder should be the first thing you probably want to do in this function. In my extension, I need to download the front page of the specific board and check the topic list to see if it matches what is stored in the database.

For now, at least, I can rely on the forum telling me about the number of replies in a thread (one less than the number of total messages), as this is shown in the thread index of a forum. What I do is grab the reply count that I've seen and subtract that from the number that is listed to get the number of new messages I need to download. Then I need only to look at the last few messages to add them to the database.

At this point, I have two main issues to worry about. First, I am working with paginated return results. That means I actually need to load multiple documents. Second, I am not getting a list of messages, but a list of threads; therefore, I need a database that is associated with threads [8].

The database I use is a simple JSON object that exists for each folder, and so far only has a mapping of threads to the reply count that I've seen; I may give it more in later iterations of this extension.

Pagination is where the trickery in implementation comes in. First, I need to look at the thread index for new messages; if I have seen all of the messages in the last thread, I can stop looking at new pages. Otherwise, I have to grab the next page and continue recursing. Note that it is possible to hit a thread that I've fully seen and still have threads I've not seen: sticky messages can be infrequently updated yet still make it first on my list of messages.

The other issue is when loading threads. The link I end up scraping is to the first page of messages for that thread, which I may already have seen. So I need to skip over pages until I find the page that first has new messages. For now, I'm doing this naïvely by actually loading each page and counting the number of posts rather than trying to deconstruct URLs and calculating where to load. I then need to look at the last set of posts, not the first set, so I calculate the start position and read forwards. Since I'm using querySelectorAll, I get an array of results, so I don't worry about having to throw out a number of iterations; I can just start in the middle when iterating.

Once all of that is implemented, we can then put everything together to make a proper implementation of updateFolder, the function we started implementing a few pages ago. The end result is that, when all is said and done, you can load up the message pane (the last column is the number of messages in the thread):

By comparison, here is an equivalent view of the forum that I loaded this from:

Now, I wish to ask you, which user interface would you rather use to view the forum?

Some notes for implementors: be prepared to delete your msf files over and over again. I would recommend tackling the individual components in this order: first build a message, then your protocol object (I found it easier to test when the running tasks were already known to be working), and then start work on tying it all into the database. Leave issues like threading for after the basic stuff is laid out, then tackle determining which messages are new if it's not implicit in what you do (i.e., you don't have a "get new messages" query you can readily use). Pagination should be last: everything is easier to test if you only have a small number of messages you really need to test.

I apologize for the excessive length of this step; this happened to be pretty much the first step where most of the necessary technology had to be used. The next step is to actually be able to display the messages in our database, which should be shorter.

Notes

8. Kent James and I are both working on developing new account type extensions (he doing an Exchange connector and I this blog series); both of us have identified the narrow-mindedness of the database as an issue. It is therefore possible that my workaround here will not be necessary in the next few versions.

June 07, 2010 10:42 PM

Welcome back! This update comes a lot later than I initially thought. On the upside I can present you with an more-or-less overview of changes between the last stable release and the first SeaMonkey 2.1 alpha version which has just been released two weeks ago (for the platform changes, see Firefox 3.6 and Mozilla Developer Preview (1.9.3 alpha)). Parallelly, SeaMonkey 2.0.5 is expected to be released tomorrow (Pacific time). The changes contained in the stable branch releases are part of the release notes nowadays so I will not track or repeat them here.

Since the first alpha has been cut, new features have already been pushed to the trunk, and more are to come. The SeaMonkey 2.1 Features wiki page tracks the overall progress of major new features. Short teaser of what is already available in trunk nightly builds:

• The Add-on Manager has been rewritten and now opens within a new tab or browser window.
• The Troubleshooting Information page (about:support), which features a short-hand for accessing your profile folder, can now be opened from the Tools menu.
• You can now drag files and URLs to and from the Download Manager, e.g. to the desktop or Explorer window.
• You can now save multiple messages as individual files in a directory.

Here is a list of notable SeaMonkey changes between versions 2.0 and 2.1 Alpha 1:

MailNews

• make sure images added to an HTML message body do not get an incorrect "attachment" disposition (Bug 525955)
• make sure that a plain text attachment with application/octet-stream content type shows inline (Bug 532603)
• only ask for master password if not already logged into the Software Security Device (Bug 534462)
• allow using multiple instances of the Forward filter action (Bug 523892)
• add Forward Inline filter action (Bug 312025)
• make nsMessenger.cpp 64-bit compatible (Bug 519021)
• make nsMsgAttachmentHandler 64-bit compatible (Bug 558246)
• allow offline stores >4GB (Bug 532323)
• extend local folder size limit to 4GB on Mac OS X (Bug 538512)
• add a space between "The message was sent successfully but could not be copied to your Sent folder." and "Would you like to return to the compose window?" (Bug 528600)
• support semicolon (;) as email address separator (e.g. in To: field) (Bug 242693)
• make sure messages marked manually as Junk are moved to Junk folder even if user does not check "Enable adaptive junk mail controls for this account" (Bug 487610)
• make sure main body part of IMAP message is downloaded when Display Attachments Inline is off and folder is not set for offline use (Bug 246415)
• make sure internal message selection state is correct after toggling folder pane off/on and switching tabs (Bug 545674)
• make sure IMAP folder size is calculated correctly when condstore is used (Bug 548584)
• do not crash when message contains a mailto: URL (Bug 546900)
• support drag&drop of single message to desktop/file system window (Bug 537448)
• wrap the message pane in a hbox for Thunderbird compatibility (Bug 544661)
• do not crash when setting message charset (related to mailnews.sendInBackground pref) (Bug 537404)
• use Create Folder as confirm button label in New Folder dialog (Bug 495939)
• support libnotify/libindicate notifications for new mail alerts (Bug 478463)
• fix Mac dock double count of unread messages on startup (Bug 516477)
• make sure attachments with octet-stream content type are accessible (Bug 538407)
• reintroduce menulist-menupopup CSS class to allow styling of folder submenus (Bug 542837)
• rewrite authentication logic for IMAP, POP and SMTP (new pref: mail.server.default.authMethod) (Bug 525238)
• show Yes/No buttons instead of OK/Cancel in NNTP cancel dialog (Bug 168231)
• handle IMAP servers that drop the connection on STARTTLS (Bug 549457)
• use Rename as confirm button label in Rename Folder dialog (Bug 495940)
• add recognition of SHA-2 hashes when verifying S/MIME messages with detached signatures (application/pkcs7-signature) (Bug 541334)
• do not indent username label in SMTP server prefs dialog (Bug 554404)
• fix crash doing STATUS on IMAP folders (Bug 550455)
• support "needs body" for custom filter actions (Bug 555051)
• do not crash while closing standalone mail window of RSS item while still loading (Bug 288172)
• add account name to IMAP alert messages (Bug 66860)
• extend MailNews back-end to allow detachment to folders (Bug 531757)
• make sure filter junk status "Not Junk" sticks (Bug 556786)
• make sure URL with JA characters attached in compose window is shown correctly in attachment box (Bug 161156)
• enable Save As dialog of mail compose window to handle non-ASCII filenames (Bug 161791)
• make sure compacting with IMAP delete model does not mess up offline store or leak temp files (Bug 546384)
• add emails to CC list (instead of BCC) automatically when sending email (Bug 269728)
• use buffered file I/O to help performance with profiles on networked file systems (Bug 539389)
• add new pref mail.biff.use_new_count_in_mac_dock to allow "New Mail" count for Mac dock icon instead of unread mail count (Bug 518828)
• make IMAP password prompts serial, using new asynchronuous prompter service (Bug 557622)
• make sure manually marking a message as NOT JUNK is sufficient and message does not get refiled as junk (Bug 540385)
• fix Forward Inline with non-default charset (Bug 494912)
• make sure cancelling the master password prompt does not bring up a second one for each connection (Bug 560740)
• hook up POP3 to asynchronous prompt service and make its password prompts serial again (Bug 557625)
• import settings from Windows Mail on Vista and Windows Live Mail on XP/Vista/Windows 7 (Bug 394687)
• make sure viewing an HTML mail is not too slow for POP and local folders (Bug 545126)
• do not close Search Messages dialog when hitting Enter but start the search (Bug 543160)
• make sure Kerberos/GSSAPI authentication does not fail when hostname is changed after account creation(Bug 530319)
• change label of Rebuild Summary File button to Repair Folder in Folder Properties and add an explanation (Bug 564610)
• do not crash while deleting message header with POP account (Bug 540074)
• use notification bar for return receipt confirmation (Bug 539066)

Address Book

• support LDAP address book names with cyrillic/chinese letters (Bug 536437)
• make sure "-addressbook" command line option does not disable Resize/Maximize window menu items (Bug 330914)
• improve handling of BirthYear in birthday field for pre-1900 dates (Bug 522642)

Download Manager

• provide new CSS for Download Manager clearListButton on Mac (Bug 536903)
• improve download progress dialogs (Bug 513691)
• rewrite broken FTP file upload dialog (Bug 467524)

History

• switch Places history to asynchronous expiration (removed browser.history_expire_* prefs, added places.history.enabled and places.database.cache_to_memory_percentage prefs) (Bug 536374)
• adapt Help for Places history changes (Bug 546936)

Audio/Video

• add full screen video playback to SeaMonkey (Bug 531576)

• limit old close tab method to three tabs (browser.tabs.max_tabs_undo pref) and use Session Restore for additional tabs (Bug 530735)
• allow to save/restore referrer (Bug 524369)
• speed up cookie saving (run after each page load) (Bug 524371)
• support input type=file multiple (Session Store part) (Bug 547710)
• move writing sessionstore.js off the main thread (Bug 547406)
• do not consider closed windows as open (Bug 548228)
• introduce sessionstore-browser-state-restored notification representing the end of the setBrowserState operation (Bug 548211)
• add support for HTML5 History.pushState(), History.replaceState() methods (Session Store parts) (Bug 558652)
• increase Session Store interval to 15s (Bug 558649)
• reduce uses of aNode.localName and namespaceURI in XPath generation (speed up counting sibling nodes) (Bug 558645)
• make sure getBrowserState does not return two entries for one window (Bug 558639)
• do not set focus to minimized windows (Bug 558638)
• skip windows that are closed but not yet destroyed (Bug 558636)
• only save form data for fields that do not have the default value (Bug 561728)

Preferences

• sync Applications Preferences pane and Modern application picker CSS with what Firefox has (Bug 538164)
• sync pref-smartupdate.* prefs with Firefox (add UI for app.update.auto and app.update.mode prefs) (Bug 541665)

Linux

• make sure Customize Toolbars window is not too small on Linux (does not cut off "Restore defaults" button) (Bug 439134)
• remove Copy Image Location from context menu now that Copy Image copies image location again (Bug 469481)

Compiling

• make sure "make distclean" fully cleans an hg src build (Bug 446690)
• make l10n nightly updates work (Bug 539938)
• add warning if configure or config.status are out of date (Bug 541657)
• remove MSVC6 support (Bug 508760)
• remove BUILD_OFFICIAL in favor of MOZILLA_OFFICIAL (Bug 542297)
• remove iconv requirement for updater on Windows (Bug 543230)
• drop configure support for cairo-mac widget toolkit (Bug 543212)
• add --hg-clone-options option to client.py (Bug 508955)
• require python >= 2.4 to build (and >=2.5 on Windows hosts) (Bug 427750)
• allow client.py network attempts to restart themselves in case of failures; add a '--retries' option (Bug 538528)
• drop support for --disable-xpfe-components configure option (Bug 552222)
• substitute Windows-style paths in configure when building with pymake (Bug 550657)
• export more header files to build Enigmail against SDK (Bug 562059)

General

• port several bugfixes from Toolkit View Source (Bug 537377)
• implement browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab functionality on SeaMonkey to avoid closing browser with last tab (Bug 533125)
• make sure an empty title attribute inhibits tooltips (Bug 264001)
• add 48x48 icon for the migration wizard (Bug 512732)
• auto hide menubar in full screen mode instead of hiding it completely (Bug 540629)
• add context variable to extensions.update.url pref indicating the context of the check (Bug 540087)
• make Print Preview show up (Bug 543205)
• improve appearance of cascading menulists in the Modern theme (Bug 542842)
• fix misalignment in --help command line option output (Bug 546296)
• remove obsolete 'Java Console' item from Tools menu (Bug 511884)
• make Crash Reporter send correct URL when crashing during pageload (Bug 548208)
• sync Page Info with Firefox (list background images in Media, resize images correctly when using scaling) (Bug 550469)
• make sure View Background Image context menu item is not always grayed out (Bug 549612)
• make Profile Importer not treat error as fatal when reading from Windows registry (Bug 537525)
• make sure Stop button is disabled when SeaMonkey opens a blank window (Bug 74571)
• add API for getting web progress notifications for all tabs; introduce support for preventing websites from auto-refreshing (accessibility.blockautorefresh pref) (Bug 558995)
• make sure drag&drop of links to contents area does not fail (Bug 560443)
• fix context menu IDs and accesskeys (Bug 487692)
• make sure history.pushState does not forget favicon and feeds (Bug 557374)
• make sure closing a window with multiple tabs produces a warning (if configured like that) (Bug 525386)
• support resizable textareas in the Modern theme (Bug 553937)
• add CSS styling for about:memory to the Modern theme (Bug 547458)
• add CSS styling for about:support to the Modern theme (Bug 561668)

May 31, 2010 12:05 AM

This week, Microsoft published an open source (Apache 2) SDK to read PST files. From what I heard, it works with Unicode PST files as generated by Outlook 2003 or later.

It’s a healthy move on Microsoft’s part, as it releases their users from feeling like their data is locked in to their relationship with Outlook. I hope the code is easy to use, etc.

I’d naturally be very interested to hear of anyone experimenting with using this code in an add-on to make the process of importing all one’s data from Outlook into Thunderbird. If you know of such an effort, let me know!

May 26, 2010 06:11 PM

This blog post is a continuation of my previous post, which is being broken up into multiple segments to lower the amount of text one has to read in a single sitting. The current step is to actually implement the folder update.

Folder updating

To actually achieve our goal of getting a correct message list, we are going to modify the implementation of updateFolder. This function is called whenever a folder is selected in the folder pane; conceptually, you can view the function as causing the cached database to be resynchronized with the actual folder. For example, this is where a local folder would actually reparse the mailbox if the database was incorrect or missing.

This function essentially consists of three steps: figure out new messages, process them (i.e., apply filters), and then announce to the world that they exist. Some account types (like IMAP) may need to do more involved message processing, but this is the general gist of what goes on [4]. I'll ignore the processing step until I start talking about filters.

Database Details Devil

To start with, I'll cover the last step. Announcing to the world that a message exist boils down to adding a new header to the database. So how do you add a new header to the database? It requires three easy steps: create the header, populate the fields, and then add it to the database. With the proper listener setup, all of the other notification is done for you automatically. But as they say, the devil is in the details.

Let me begin by explaining some things about messages. There are five different representations of the message: the message key, the message header, the message ID, the message URI, and the necko URL object. Siddharth Agarwal has a nice diagram that shows how to convert between these representations. The last two are more concerned with displaying messages; it is the first three that are interesting right now.

Message keys are the internal database key for a message; the tuple (folder, key) is guaranteed to be unique by the database. Message keys are unsigned 32-bit integers (with 0xFFFFFFFF, or -1 in 2's complement, reserved as the "no message here" key). In general, any time a property needs to refer to another message, the message key is used; as a consequence, it means that such properties cannot refer to stuff across folders.

Message IDs are the RFC 5322 identifier for a message. These identifiers are supposed to be unique (for logical messages, not in a "the message at offset 0x234f3d in this file" sense). The most important use case for message IDs is that they are a critical component for threading.

The message header object is an object of type nsIMsgDBHdr. These are objects are directly backed by the database. However, many of the properties do not notify the database of changes, so you generally do not want to actually set them. Like all generalities [5], there are exceptions to this rule. Right now, we want to manipulate headers before adding them to database, and therefore we do not want to notify people of changes to not-yet-existing headers, so we want to actually use the fields of nsIMsgDBHdr.

So, the first thing you need to do is to decide what your message key is. Message keys are going to be used to get the message URI, so it should be a property that is easy to associate with methods. IMAP uses message UIDS, local folders the offset into the mbox [6], and NNTP uses the key numbers in the group. In my case, it appears that the forum assigns each post a unique number, so that is what I'll use.

After the message key, the most important properties are the major ones for display. The author attribute correlates to the "From" header, subject to the "Subject" header, and date to the "Date" header. All of these will be used to generate values in the thread pane columns; things would look strange without these.

The other major property in the display is flags. Flags, as the name implies, is an integer where each bit corresponds to a different flag. The most important of these are probably HasRe, Flagged, and New. Flags should be set with OrFlags and AndFlags instead of manipulating the value directly. And don't set these values with the mark* methods, as these cause notifications to be fired (remember that we haven't added the message to the database yet).

If you want to do real threading, you will want to set message IDs and references [7]. The References header is a space-separated list of message ID tokens (wrapped in angle brackets), although the parser routine in the database does a pretty good job of ignoring any random crap. The list is in the reverse order of hierarchy, so the last element is the message's parent, second-to-last the grandparent, etc.

Threading is implemented in the following manner. First, the database attempts to find a message for each message ID in reverse order. If it finds one, that is made the parent header and threading stops. Otherwise, if correct threading is enabled, an attempt is to made to find a thread which has that message ID. Otherwise, if use strict threading is not enabled, a thread that has a message which has the same subject (without Re) is used as the thread. If threading without re is disabled, the message has to have the HasRe flag checked to perform the last step. Finally, if a thread could not be found by this point, a new one is created.

To combine messages in a thread, then, the References field needs to be set for the messages. If people enable correct threading (this is done by default), you can use a simple trick: create a valid message ID for each thread and stuff that as the References header.

A practical example

In my case, I have an author (without email addresses), a subject (with possible non-ASCII text but without Re: stuff), a date in a standard format, as well as a simple per-thread unique identifier for message keys. I also want to make threads—although this will only be two-level threads. Ideally, I should also be flagging the sticky threads, but I'll leave that for a later version. So what does this code look like?

_loadThread: function (document, firstMsgId) {
  let database = this._folder.getDatabase();
  let conv = Cc['@mozilla.org/messenger/mimeconverter;1']
               .getService(Ci.nsIMimeConverter);
  let subject = /* one for the thread */
  let hostname = this._folder.server.hostName;
  let charset = document.characterSet;
  /* for each new message */ {
    let postID = /* generate msg key */;
    let author = /* get author name */;
    let date = new Date(/* get text string*/);
    let msgHdr = database.CreateNewHdr(postID);
    // The | is to prevent accidental message delivery
    msgHdr.author = conv.encodeMimePartIIStr_UTF8(
      author + " <" + author + "@" + hostname + "|>", true, charset, 0, 72);
    msgHdr.subject = conv.encodeMimePartIIStr_UTF8(subject, false, charset,
      0, 72);
    // PRTime is in µs, JS date in ms
    msgHdr.date = date * 1000;
    msgHdr.Charset = charset;
    msgHdr.messageId = postID + "@" + document.documentURI;
    if (firstMsgId) {
      msgHdr.setReferences("<" + firstMsgId + ">");
      msgHdr.OrFlags(Ci.nsMsgMessageFlags.HasRe);
    } else {
      firstMsgId = msgHdr.messageId;
   }
   msgHdr.OrFlags(Ci.nsMsgMessageFlags.New);
   database.AddNewHdrToDB(msgHdr, true);
  }
}

First, we get a reference to the database. Remember we implemented this in our last step, so this shouldn't present any problems. We also get the things that are shared in this thread: the subject, hostname of the server, and the charset. For each of the posts, we collect the post ID, the author, and the date of the post as text strings, and then convert them into an integer, string, and a date respectively.

Using the CreateNewHdr function, we get a new message header that we can manipulate. Since I'm trying to be aware of non-ASCII text, I'm using the MIME encoding strings to prepare the author and subject. Remember that the MIME specifications want you to encode non-ASCII text in the headers; the function we use is the simplest way to do the encoding.

If you're not working with actual email, the from string can be contorted. What I did was to create a fictituous email that could be theoretically tied back to the author in a systematic way (for a possible future compose code that does forum private messaging). The purpose of the pipe character at the end is to prevent accidental mail delivery; I also used the hostName and not the realHostName, so this email address would be traceable even if the user changes the host name on me.

The message date I have is a formatted string; the Date constructor is pretty handy at converting most forms of these strings into a usable JS Date object. Then I have a JS Date object, which is measured in milliseconds, whereas the date attribute is a PRTime, which is measured in microseconds, so I need to multiply by 1000 to actually set the property. Ironically, the date is actually stored in seconds in database and is converted to and from microseconds on the fly.

The Charset attribute, apparently only used for search right now, is derived from the character set as reported by the DOM. This means that it is the same character set as would be assumed by the layout engine, including character set overrides.

The message ID is simpler to generate: valid URIs are pretty much valid right-hand-sides of a message ID. A post is pretty much representable as a tuple of the thread page and the path to the post in the DOM, so this message ID is also an easy way to get to the message. References are also generated as I described above; in a later version, I may try to do sniffing to figure out from quoting who is replying to whom and recreate actual threads. Note that when setting the message ID, the outer angle brackets are optional.

The last thing I set is the flags. A complete listing of flags can be found on MDC. In this case, the only flags I care about are HasRe (since I want to generate "Re:" headers) and New; most of the others will probably be set by the user in the UI.

Finally, we add the header to the database. The last parameter tells the database to tell anyone listening that we have a new message. After we have loaded all of the messages, we need to commit the database:

database.Commit(Ci.nsMsgDBCommitType.kLargeCommit);

A brief note to make here: it doesn't really matter if you do a large or session commit, they both end up doing the same thing. Small commits end up doing nothing.

Notes

4. Like most synchronization stuff, you theoretically also have to deal with deletion on the remote side as well as read changes, etc. The more I think about it, the more I'm torn on whether or not I should implement it. For now, I'll recommend that you weigh the cost of trying to determine deleted messages versus the commonality of deletion or other modification.
5. Except, I am told, that all words that end in -tion in French are female.
6. Incidentally, this is a major part of the reason why there is a 4 GiB limit on mailbox size in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.
7. What about In-Reply-To, you may ask. This information is pretty much redundant with References, so what happens is that, for the purposes of computing threading, this header is appended to the References header. And you do this before calling on the database header.

May 21, 2010 09:47 PM

• configuring require() by passing in a config object to it
• plugins
• require.modify
• require.nameToUrl
  
• require.ready (does not make sense)

May 19, 2010 09:51 PM

SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 1, a first preview of functionality in work for SeaMonkey's future is available for free download. Please note that this pre-release version is intended for developers and testers only. As always, we appreciate any feedback you may have and encourage users to help us by filing bugs.

This developer preview introduces many improvements, including:

• Better performance on startup and shutdown, as well as for JavaScript.
• Full screen HTML5 video.
• Resizeable text areas in web forms.
• A new Troubleshooting Information page (about:support).
• Notification bars for MailNews return receipts (MDN).
• Support for SMIL animation, CSS transitions, a new HTML5 parser, new DOM, HTML5 and CSS features as well as downloadable WOFF fonts.
• CSS :visited selectors that cannot be read by web sites (privacy improvement).

We welcome any and all discussions on this alpha on our newsgroups, or you can even file a bug if you find one. Be sure to check our Known Issues prior to filing bugs.

SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 1 is available for free download on the SeaMonkey website. Once you have downloaded and installed this release, we'd like to encourage you to
get involved in discussing and reporting problems as well as further improving the product.

Thanks for testing and helping us to make SeaMonkey even better!

P.S.: A Belarusian localization of this entry is now available!

May 19, 2010 02:41 AM

May 18, 2010 08:58 AM

• There is a new priority config option to indicate priority, parallel download of build layers.
• A new JSONP plugin allows you to treat any JSONP service as dependency.
• require.js should be Caja-compliant. The plugins may not be, but the main require.js file passed cajoling on http://caja.appspot.com/.
• Instructions and optimization support for renaming require().
• There is a new RequireJS+Transport D download option that supports the CommonJS Transport D proposal. This can be useful in conjunction with the server-side Transporter project.

require({
  priority: [
      "http://your.domain.com/opt?include=event,object,widget,Dialog&exclude=jquery",
      "http://your.domain.com/opt?include=page1,Tabs&exclude=jquery,event,object,widget,Dialog&exclude=jquery"
  ]
}, ["page1"]);

May 17, 2010 04:51 AM