225158 - Thunderbird should act as an RSS/Atom newsreader, too

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, enhancement)

Description

[Grey Nicholson (they/them)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031109 Firebird/0.7+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031109 Firebird/0.7+

I'm no expert (and I'm probably missing something vital :), but it seems that
Thunderbird could be fairly simply extended to read RSS newsfeeds too.

The "Add account" dialogue could have a third option, "Newsfeed account (RSS)"
perhaps. All RSS feeds could be automatically placed into a folder, "RSS feeds";
the user could, of course, make their own subfolders in order to categorise feeds.

The main display could work a lot like the current handling of newsgroups;
except Subject would be named Title; Sender, Author; and so on.

It'd be a hell of a nice new feature; possibly even unique?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

Yes, I've been thinking about an RSS extension to thunderbird and what such an
extension should do recently as well.

Comment 2

[Manko]

Dupe of bug 171453?

Comment 3

[Grey Nicholson (they/them)]

Bug 171354 is for the browser; related, though.

Comment 4

[Thom]

can this bug be voted on?

Comment 5

[Grey Nicholson (they/them)]

re: comment 4: that's bug 214124

Comment 6

[Maarten Brouwers]

Attachment: screenshot of how opera works with rss feeds

The way Scott MacGregor describes how RSS feeds could be integrated into
thunderbird works already with Opera's mailclient M2 (the beta Opera 7.5 at
least has it...)

It's completely integrated, and works just the way e-mail works... it can also
be filtered; copied to mail folders, very interesting.

I've added an screenshot of M2 displaying an rss feed for better illustration.

Comment 7

[Scott MacGregor]

verycool. thanks for the screen shot. 

Comment 8

[Alessandro Minelli]

(In reply to comment #5)
> re: comment 4: that's bug 214124

The funny thing is that You can't even vote for bug 214124 ;-(

Comment 9

[Tor Bjornrud]

+1 vote :p

Comment 10

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: backend changes for rss feeds...

initial backend work, starting from Seth's patch, and some stuff added...

Comment 11

[David :Bienvenu]

I've also checked in some initial code for a thunderbird extension to work with
this backend code, in mail/extensions/newsblog - it's basically myk's forumzilla
extension code with a few changes to use the new backend rss server, and I've
added a js component that the rss server code can use to update/download a feed.
There's a lot of duplicate code between the js component and the extension. I
think the duplication will be removed by moving more code into the js component,
and calling the js component from the extension js, but I need to get a much
better idea of what the interface(s) will look like.

I've added the destination folder for the feed to the subscription ds -
currently, it will always be the folder with the feed name under the news &
blogs server, but  in the future, that will allow us to be flexible about where
the feed gets downloaded.

The next thing I'm going to do is write some code to make unsubscribe work - if
the folder is under the news and blog server, and there are no other feeds
feeding into that folder, then the folder should be removed.

Comment 12

[cls]

This checkin broke my SeaMonkey build since I don't have the xmlextras extension
enabled.  Can we disable this feature if xmlextras isn't being built?

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Do you thought about the feature to write comments to a newsfeed?

Comment 14

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: remove dependency on xmlextras

Comment 15

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: scratch that, don't need dom anymore either.

Comment 16

[Robert Accettura [:raccettura]]

Perhaps we could repurpose the notification code used by mail into something
more generic.

That way, a user can ask to be notified if a feed is updated.  Perhaps use a
different sound, and color/icon for the popup notification.

Comment 17

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: turn on unsubscribe, fix handling of case where folders for subscribed feed have been deleted

Comment 18

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: allow new flag to be set from js

need to make set flags set flags_inited flags so we won't crunch the result of
an initial setFlags.

Comment 19

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: fix unsubscribing to feeds that end with '.', set new flag on new hdrs

this change also removes the onload timer stuff, which I'm not sure of the need
for (perhaps because the folder pane in tbird does a delayed load - perhaps we
need to make sure the accounts get loaded in our onload.

Comment 20

[Grey Nicholson (they/them)]

Adding Atom to summary - if we can do RSS, we can do Atom

Comment 21

[Steve Brown]

Even *Ximian Evolution* has had integrated RSS feeds for months!!!  Its kind of
buried, though.  You might never find it if you didn't know it was there (.  Now
you know - go check it out ('Tools | Settings | Summary Preferences'. 'News
Feeds' tab).  Article titles appear in the 'Summary'.  In Mozilla/Thunderbird,
I'd suggest adding a 'News Feed' folder, in addition to 'Junk', 'Sent',
'Drafts', etc.  I see no need to make a user add an account, as has been
previously suggested here.  Possibly allow the user to drag-and-drop URLs to the
folder to add new feeds.  Provide a selection of useful feeds.

Since a screenshot of Opera has been posted, I'll try to post one of Evolution,
but since I'm in Windows now, I'll have to do it from another computer.

Comment 22

[Steve Brown]

Attachment: Screen shot of RSS news feeds in Evolution

Shows feed/article titles in summary and setup dialog.

Comment 23

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Note that a new version (0.5.1) of Forumzilla, the extension upon which this
code is based, has been released at:

http://forumzilla.mozdev.org/

Highlights since 0.5.0 include:

    * a new subscriptions manager for maintaining your feed subscriptions;
    * the option to download stories into any local/POP folder;
    * no need for a separate "News & Blogs" account;
    * a link for opening stories in your web browser;
    * a fix for the bug that caused Forumzilla to redownload stories
      after you deleted them;
    * some performance improvements;
    * a bunch of other bug fixes.

Note that the patches in this bug are forked from an early version of 0.5.1 and
thus may have a version of some of these enhancements.

Comment 24

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: make filters work on rss messages

this patch adds a new interface to nsIMsgLocalMailFolder to add a message, and
switches the newsblog extension to use the interface. This makes it so mail
filters will now work on newsblog messages. I'm seeing an anomaly with "Fr"
displayed before the message, that might be related to this change, though
everything looks OK in the mailbox, and in the message source.

Comment 25

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 152456 [details] [diff] [review]
make filters work on rss messages

I'll speak up if I start seeing your FR issue after I update with this change
:)

Comment 26

[David :Bienvenu]

the message size is off by 2, I'm pretty sure - 2 bytes too big. I'll try to
figure out why. I'm just throwing the data at the parser - not sure it's getting
the message size wrong.

Comment 27

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: fix FR problem in previous patch

this fixes the problem I mentioned before...

Comment 28

[Richard Klein]

When will this be included with the nightly aviary branch builds?

Comment 29

[David :Bienvenu]

it will be when mscott turns it on, which should be any day now, if it hasn't
already happened.

Comment 30

[Andre Knoche]

As with Forumzilla, the integrated RSS reader doesn't handle special characters
(like ä, ö, ü) correctly, instead it only displays a question mark. Two feeds
where you can see this behaviour:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise.rdf
http://photodb.kicker.de/library/rss091/kicker.xml

Will this issue be "tackled" in the near future? :)

Comment 31

[David Björklund]

this has been adressed as a problem in the seperate bug 253807

Comment 32

[Thomas Stache]

What is the trick to have Thunderbird display the <description/>?

Works here:
http://www.internet-nexus.com/rss.xml

Doesn't work here (shows webpage directly):
http://photodb.kicker.de/library/rss091/kicker.xml

Comment 33

[David :Bienvenu]

marking fixed - please open new bugs for remaining issues. Scott and I (mostly
Scott :-) )have got it basically working.

Neither Scott or I are planning on porting this to Seamonkey, but that doesn't
mean someone else can't or won't.

Comment 34

[Adam Hauner]

I filled bug 255834 for Seamonkey port.

Comment 35

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

v.

Comment 36

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 151466 [details] [diff] [review]
allow new flag to be set from js

clearing old request