278883 - Use SQL for Thunderbird mailstores

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Michał J. Gajda]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041128 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0-4)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041128 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0-4)

Building Thunderbird 1.0.7 w/SQL enabled gives XPIs,
but doesn't enable TBird to show SQL preferences.
SQL component is hard to configure.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Build Thunderbird 1.0 with SQL support enabled.
2. Open built application.
3. Open Edit > Preferences menu.
4. Search for "SQL Preferences".

Actual Results:  
None "SQL preferences" will be found.

Expected Results:  
"SQL Preferences" tab should be present.

Needed to make Thunderbird store e-mails in SQL database.
Current mbox stores are very slow for huge number of e-mails.

Comment 1

[Jan Varga [:janv]]

Wow! you want to use it to store messages and stuff?
I'm interested to see the code.

Btw, there are sql xpis at update.mozilla.org for mozilla suite and there's also
bug filed for firefox.

Anyway, I don't think you need to use mozISqlService to get a connection. You
can create it directly. The contract ID is
"@mozilla.org/sql/connection;1?type=<type>"
Type can be one of these: pgsql, mysql or sqlite.

Connection info would be defined in account manager, in server settings panel.

Comment 2

[Michał J. Gajda]

I'm affraid that setting connection in account manager may be incompatible with
"Global Inbox" feature? (I thought that the extension could enable "conversion"
of  folders from MBOX to SQL and back again?)
BTW The code for EVM is at http://s3.cs.uni-essen.de/teaching/material/EVM/.

Comment 3

[Jan Varga [:janv]]

What do you mean by conversion?
You can just copy/move messages or whole folder between different accounts.
That should be transparent conversion, invisible to the user.

AFAIK, the global index feature is specific to POP and local folders, so it has
nothing to do with the new type of server.

Anyway, this seems like a lot of work, good luck.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

invalid?

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Thunderbird now supports pluggable mail stores (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Pluggable_Mail_Stores). We're working on a maildir-like implementation which should improve performance over mbox, however we're not planning on a SQL based implementation as that could be quite complex.

If anyone wants to try this, then doing it as an add-on would be the best way forward. I don't see us currently wanting to support it in-application, unless significant benefits could be proved first.