xi/xi-conversations

Minimal clone of thunderbird conversations

This is a minimal clone of thunderbird-conversations. While contributing to that project I found that I did not understand a lot of things. I used this repo as a notepad whenever I found out how something works.

As a consequence, this project is not meant to be used in production. That is not to say that it would not work. But I do not recommend it.

Differences to thunderbird-conversations

• I ignored most edge-cases to keep the code straight-forward.
• No preview.
• No quickreply.
• The conversation view is not automatically updated when new messages come in.
• The conversation view is only triggered when you open a message in a new tab.

Things I learned while working on this

• Many thunderbird APIs have next to no documentation. But reading the code is not that bad and it is easily searchable with DXR. Much of the thunderbird code itself is actually written in JavaScript.
• The extensions relies heavily on Gloda.
• thunderbird-conversations was a bootstrapped extension. This has since been replaced by web extensions. Much of the functionality is not supported via the new APIs so thunderbird-conversations now makes extensive use of WebExtension Experiments.
• Plugging into enigmail is hard.
• protz and Standard8 did an amazing job handling all those edge cases and making it work for humans.

Install

If you feel adventurous and actually want to try this out, you will need to do the following steps:

• Install node with npm and browserify as well as sassc.
• Run make.
• Link the repository to $PROFILE/extensions/conversations@xi.
• Restart thunderbird.

xi-conversations's Issues

Unable to open messages from trash

When a message is opened, we need to tell our own code which messages should be displayed. There are three possible identifier we could use for that:

• MessageHeader.id: the ID used by the Webextension APIs
  • Not constant across restarts
• URI: A URI describing the location of the message
  • Changes when the message is moved
  • Used by thunderbird-conversations
  • Used by xi-conversations until 2db414a
• MessageHeader.headerMessageId / msgHdr.messageId: The Message-ID header from the email itself
  • Not guaranteed (but very likely) to be unique
  • Only indexed messages can be found
  • Used by xi-conversations since 2db414a

The trash folder is not indexed by default, so xi-conversation has no way to find trashed messages via Message-ID. This means that in 2db414a we gave away the ability to open trashed messages ang gained the ability to keep messages open after they have been moved.

Maybe there is a way to get both, e.g. by passing both URI and Message-ID.