Open Bug 275770 Opened 20 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Improvement of file name for a mail folder when folder name contains illegal file name characters or some special characters

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Database, enhancement)

enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

People

(Reporter: World, Unassigned)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug)

Details

As a result of great efforts by developers, many problems relates to special
characters in mail folder name have been resolved.
(Remaining problem seems to be startting ".", ending ".", ending "~", and string
of "%25" in folder name, if local folder)

But current implementation creates file name of converted string (hexa decimal
string) for mail folder name includes special characters.
For example, Thunderbird 1.0(release build, on Japanese MS Win-2K) created 
file/directry set of "d03075c9" , "d03075c9.msf" , "d03075c9.sbd"
for folder name of "A/B.C#D".
("/" and "#" problem were already resolved.)
The folder name is kept in ".msf" file.

This causes user's confusion in import or mail folder backup/recovery, although
current mechanism works perfectly and has no problem in any cases, including
usual ".msf" recreation.
This also makes traditional manual mail folder recovery by user, deleting ".msf"
and restart, very difficult, because the folder name is kept in ".msf" file only
and it is very hard to decode for usual human beings.

I think there are some ways to reduce above incoveniences.
 (1) Change hashing algorythm.
     Keep non-special characters as many as possible including position of them.
     If file name for folder "A/B.C#D" is "A_<Hexa-01>_B.C_<Hexa-02>_D",
     users can easily guess folder name than current.
 (2) Keep folder name in a text file in UTF-8
     Since many text editors can handle UTF-8, including notepad on Win-2K/XP,
     if folder name is kept in <Hased-Name>.xxx file in UTF-8,
     user can easily know original folder name of the <Hased-Name> file. 

And file name display by property of mail folder is preferable.
(This is probably already requested in other enhancement request bug.)
Slightly improved when "ending dot" case. "A.B.Ce6bad49d" is created for folder name of "A.B.C". (probably also "ending tilde" and "ending space" case)
See Bu 379101 Comment #10.
Following is a part of Bug 303729 Comment #4 by David Bienvenu on 2007-03-05.
> I've pretty much decided that the hashing thing we do for "illegal" folder
> names was a bad idea - we should have tried to hew as close as possible
> to the original folder name.
QA Contact: database
Product: Core → MailNews Core
Blocks: 533640
Blocks: 547564
Assignee: dbienvenu → nobody
Severity: normal → S3
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