Why we need Gecko updates

[Joshua Cranmer 🐧]

On 12/11/2015 12:44 AM, Andrew Sutherland wrote:
> I think potentially a more interesting account type would be support for
> "backfilling" mailing lists by ingesting their archives.  Much of this
> would likely resemble heuristics/rules for figuring out where the
> archives are for the various mailing list managers informed by list-*
> headers and then using an appropriate mbox-like parser.  This is again
> somewhat more low level, but I think makes a perfect area of overlap
> between Thunderbird between gaia mail and other JS mail clients.  I
> would love to help contribute to something like this, and hopefully
> others would too.

Back when I was originally exploring adding new account types in 2007 
(!), the two account types I was looking at implementing were mailing 
list archives and web forums. It's worth pointing out that Mailman 3 has 
talked about (implemented? I'm not entirely sure) exposing their archive 
history via NNTP, since it's sort of the exact kind of simple protocol 
that's useful for indicating archive histories.
> In the immediate term, I think our area of overlap continues to be JS
> implementations of protocols.

Would it be possible to draft you or someone else on the Gaia email team 
for structuring JS library imports into comm-central? As we look into 
moving stuff into JS, it would be great to share the protocol 
implementations more widely, and that really means that we need to make 
it easier to port between smaller package repositories (like JSMime) and 
comm-central. Thunderbird has a sufficiently large userbase that it's 
arguably the best chance for email-relevant libraries to actually make 
sure they work on real world data by confirming that they can be used by 
TB's multi-million-large userbase.

For what it's worth, the rough list of stuff that is sanely shareable 
IMHO: POP, IMAP, SMTP, NNTP, chat protocols (IRC, Oscar, Yahoo, MSN, 
???), LDIF, vCard, CardDAV, iCal, CalDAV, MIME (+ mbox, S/MIME, PGP, 
TNEF, uuencode, yEnc), SASL, Bayesian message classification, 
SIEVE/MANAGESIEVE. Probably a few utility libraries as well.

-- 
Joshua Cranmer
Thunderbird and DXR developer
Source code archæologist