122651 - (cal-integration) Integration tracking bug (Calendar Requirements Document, section 8)

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Calendar :: General, defect)

Description

[Chris Charabaruk]

This is a tracking bug for Integration with Email, section 7.0 of the Calendar 
Requirements 
Document.

Comment 1

[Dan Parent]

I'm going to start work on email support in calendar so I guess I'll take this bug.

Comment 2

[Dan Parent]

maybe I'll assign it to myself as well...

Comment 3

[Dan Parent]

Here are the possible scenarios I have come up with in regards to starting up
calendar with email support.  The user may fall into any of 8 categories that
will need to be handled:

1. No mailnews component installed
2. No email account setup (mailnews is however installed)
3. 1 email account, no SMTP server setup (very rare case)
4. 1 email account, 1 SMTP server setup
5. 1 email account, multiple SMTP servers setup
6. multiple email accounts, no SMTP server setup (even rarer case)
7. multiple email accounts, 1 SMTP server setup
8. multiple email accounts, multiple SMTP servers setup

To start off scenario 1, 2, 4 can be solved easily and 5, 6, 8 can be solved by
using the default account and the no SMTP would have to be a seperate case as well.

My first run at implementation will take all 8 seperate scenarios and boil them
down to an easier to implement 3 (as grouped above) and later on develop a more
fine grained approach by allowing the choice of email account/SMTP server
combination specific to your calendar.

Comments are welcome.

Comment 4

[gary.frederick]

from rfc2447 (iMIP)

4.2 Using Multipart Alternative for Low Fidelity Clients

   This example shows how a client can emit a multipart message that
   includes both a plain text version as well as the full iCalendar
   object.  Clients that do not support text/calendar will still be
   capable of rendering the plain text representation.

   From: [e-mail]
   To: [e-mail]
   Subject: Phone Conference
   Mime-Version: 1.0
   Content-Type: multipart/alternative;boundary="01BD3665.3AF0D360"

   --01BD3665.3AF0D360
   Content-Type: text/plain;charset=us-ascii
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

   This is an alternative representation of a TEXT/CALENDAR MIME Object
   When: 7/1/1997 10:00AM PDT - 7/1/97 10:30AM PDT
   Where:
   Organizer: [e-mail]
   Summary: Phone Conference

   --01BD3665.3AF0D360
   Content-Type:text/calendar; method=REQUEST; charset=US-ASCII
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

   BEGIN:VCALENDAR
   PRODID:-//ACME/DesktopCalendar//EN
   METHOD:REQUEST
   VERSION:2.0
   BEGIN:VEVENT
   ORGANIZER:mailto:[e-mail]
   ATTENDEE;ROLE=CHAIR;ATTSTAT=ACCEPTED:mailto:[e-mail]
   ATTENDEE;RSVP=YES;TYPE=INDIVIDUAL:mailto:[e-mail]
   DTSTAMP:19970611T190000Z
   DTSTART:19970701T170000Z
   DTEND:19970701T173000Z
   SUMMARY:Phone Conference
   UID:calsvr.example.com-8739701987387771
   SEQUENCE:0
   STATUS:CONFIRMED
   END:VEVENT
   END:VCALENDAR

Comment 5

[Chris Charabaruk]

Bugspam: Adding meta keyword to tracking bugs, something they should have had
from the start. :P

Comment 6

[Caspy7]

My exhortation to the implementers of this feature is to keep in mind security
when creating this feature.  Anything that automatically does something when
received in the email makes me nervous.  If someone figured out how to get local
access with this feature it would be bad news.
Also curious if it will be necessary to turn on Javascript in mailnews in order
to take advantage of this feature?  Necessitating this would, of course,
increase security threats in general.

Comment 7

[Chris Charabaruk]

Do you have any examples of this feature allowing any breaches of security? And
as far as I can tell, there'll be no need for JavaScript in MailNews.

Comment 8

[Dan Parent]

I doubt this will require javascript being turned on in mailnews, I can't say
that in all certainty currently though.  Nothing will automatically happen
though except for nicer formatting of a calendar event message.  I'm thinking
along the lines of having a button appear in the message allowing for easy
scheduling of an event if the user decides they want to add it to their
calendar.  In no way should mailnews automatically accept appointments or do
anything for calendar without a user clicking a button telling it to do so.

Comment 9

[ajbu]

Note that Outlook (2002) does not directly support calendar events in 
multipart mime as in comment #4.
Outlook seems only to react on a singlepart message with type text/calendar, 
or to messages with an attachment of type application/ms-tnef a MAPI storage 
format by Microsoft.
You can drop the ical attacment onto the calendar manualy.

Comment 10

[Greg Hetman]

It would be nice to see Mozilla Calendar integrate into EMail just as Mozilla
EMail integrates (full IMAP support, LDAP for email addressing, etc.)  After
this functionality is fully available, it would be helpful to also send and
receive email calendar events in MS Outlook format.  As stated in the above
comment, MS does not follow the MIME formated request.  All that would be needed
to allow full integration to an Exchange or Outlook system would be to send
emails to in the Outlook format to send meeting requests.  Then to check the
IMAP server for meeting requests from others and automatically add it to the
calendar (or give the user the option when it detects a new email meeting
request).  
   

Comment 11

[Brant Gurganus]

Default QA Contact for Calendar has changed.  If you wish to remain the QA
contact for this bug, feel free to change it back.

Comment 12

[kevin driedger]

Integration with Email also means that I should be able to drag and drop an
email onto the Calendar and have a new appointment pop up with the current date
and time filled in and the subject of the email would be used as the subject of
the appointment (perhaps without Re: or Fwd: on it).   Ultimately my dream would
be to have a fuzzy parser that would parse the content of the email that was
just dropped and try to figure out some date time information.  

Any progress in this area, Brant?

Comment 13

[Sylvain]

Something that would be very nice in Calendar: integration with the adress book.
 That's a feature I like very much in Outlook, and I'm not the only one.  In the
adress book of Outlook, there are fields "birthday" and "special date".  All my
friends birthdays are stored there.  The nice part is that when I enter a
birthday in the adress book, it also appears on the calendar so that I'm warned
when I have send someone a greeting card.  Very nice tool.  Couldn't it be
possible to create such an integration in Calendar and Adress Book?

Sorry if this isn't the right thread to ask this.  Thank you very much!

Comment 14

[Christian Schneider]

Another nice integration with e-mail would be a storage of the calendar data on
an imap Server. The bynari connector does this for outlook. We currently use it
at work. One Folder in Imap is marked for Calendar data. In it each Message
represents one Appointment. Message subject is the Appointment Subjet, Message
date is the Appointment startdate. The other data ist stored as an attachment.

They use the folders and the Folder permissions to share the calendar data
between users. It would be absolutely great to have one Storage for Outlook with
bynari and for Mozilla Calendar.  

They have a lot of interesting documentation on their servers we could sure
benefit of : http://www.bynari.net/index.php?id=431

Comment 15

[David Fraser]

A very helpful (and hopefully basic) step towards integration would be to simply
allow Calendars to appear in the hierarchy of mail folders, even if the storage
is entirely separate. This would allow users to see them as integrated
applications... the real mailing integration could be added later.

Comment 16

[Vladimir Fedak]

Attachment: Icon in Thunderbird

Comment 17

[Vladimir Fedak]

Comment on attachment 142137 [details]
Icon in Thunderbird

This is icon of calendar in Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 (20040207). In my home
opinion , it's too big :)

Comment 18

[Vladimir Fedak]

When I installed calendar as extension in Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 (20040207) and
try to add icons to toolbar (right click/customize/drag&drop) it creates REALLY
big icon

Comment 19

[Jase Roberts]

Hey Calendar team.  Can anyone provide some information as to why Calendar has
never been part of the "core" Mozilla suite, and where one should lobby to get
it there?  This has bothered me since I first started using Mozilla 1.0.  I've
heard co-workers comment a number of times that they don't switch to Mozilla as
their default mail client because they're "hooked" on Outlook task/event
reminders.  For the average user, Calendar is certainly a more useful
application than Chatzilla or Composer (does *anyone* use Composer?).  This
article on MozillaZine (January, 2003 --
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2806) suggested that the
integration was coming soon.  What happened?

It especially annoyed me that when I upgraded to 1.6 a couple months ago,
Calendar was either removed (as part of that "unapproved 3rd party applications"
step) or disabled.  Haven't investigated which yet.  I just know that my
shortcut to "C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Mozilla\mozilla.exe" -calendar doesn't
start Calendar anymore (I get http://www.mozilla.org/start/ in the browser instead).

Anyway, I appreciate the hard work that has done on this and don't mean to
gripe, just want someone to direct me to the proper forum to express my support
for Calendar as a key appliction in the suite.  I'm sure there are thousands of
users out there with similar concerns.  Wonder if they, like me, simply haven't
figured out where to make their voices heard?  -Jase

Comment 20

[Kevin MacClay]

(In reply to comment #10)
> It would be nice to see Mozilla Calendar integrate into EMail just as Mozilla
> EMail integrates (full IMAP support, LDAP for email addressing, etc.)  After
> this functionality is fully available, it would be helpful to also send and
> receive email calendar events in MS Outlook format.  As stated in the above
> comment, MS does not follow the MIME formated request.  All that would be 
needed
> to allow full integration to an Exchange or Outlook system would be to send
> emails to in the Outlook format to send meeting requests.  Then to check the
> IMAP server for meeting requests from others and automatically add it to the
> calendar (or give the user the option when it detects a new email meeting
> request).  

I'm interested in becoming involved and contributing in this area.  I think 
integration with Outlook meeting requests would make it easier for people to 
transition to Thunderbird in an environment where Outlook is the current 
heavyweight.  Since it seems no one has started on this, I'm willing to 
initiate development in this area.  I'll start researching what areas may 
present a challenge and generally what will have to be done.

Comment 21

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

(In reply to comment #20)
> I'm interested in becoming involved and contributing in this area.  I think 
> integration with Outlook meeting requests would make it easier for people to 
> transition to Thunderbird in an environment where Outlook is the current 
> heavyweight.  Since it seems no one has started on this, I'm willing to 
> initiate development in this area.  I'll start researching what areas may 
> present a challenge and generally what will have to be done.

Lightning is probably the project where this makes the most sense.  See <http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning> for some info, and feel free to drop by #calendar in irc.mozilla.org to discuss, as active developers are often there.

Comment 22

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

We don't need this tracking bug, because the underlying requirement document is outdated and has therefore been removed.