185423 - RFE: ability to open an arbitrary mailbox file by URL

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Dan Price]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021206
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021206


On my company's intranet, I often find mailbox files as the result of web
searches.  We have a large amount of data stored in what I guess is the
standard mbox format.

I'd like to be able to view these files when I find them using mozilla.
If I click on the file, mozilla will dutifully open them, and render them
as text; but that's annoying because reading email messages that way is
tough--- you can't follow the thread of conversation, examine attachments,
etc.  A real pain.

Today I do 'mutt -Rf /path/to/mailbox'.  But if the mailbox file I find is
only accessible via HTTP, then I have to first download it.  All of this is
very cumbersome.  I really just want to click and have the mailnews UI take
over.

As a first step, it would be nice to have enough UI support to point
mail/news at a file, HTTP or FTP URI and ask it to try to open that
as a mailbox; I'm not sure exactly how that would look in the UI.
I guess care would need to be taken to handle the read-only-ness of
such mailboxes, but perhaps that's already in mozilla.  I don't want to
consider such mailboxes as "local folders"-- I just want to browse them
like any other content.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Dan Price]

I've just noticed that if I serve a single email up over HTTP, mozilla
seems to think that it is a mail message, and does a nice job of pretty-
printing it.

However, this doesn't work properly for mail spools--- it seems to think
the whole spool is one giant message.

In any case, I'd rather mozilla opened the email or the spool up in
mailnews.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.