916513 - CLI (Command Line Interface) for thunderbird

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[hawat.thufir]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130201190421

Steps to reproduce:

no steps


Actual results:

no results


Expected results:

feature request:

Please allow CLI live interaction with thunderbird to read and compose e-mails.

Comment 1

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

Hmm, you should be able to, for example, compose a message from the command-line, see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments_(Thunderbird). But maybe that wasn't what you had in mind?

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

The problem is that still the UI is needed to actually send the message, as I understand the (rather short) description of this bug. An entirely CLI-only based operation may be tricky to implement for all functions, and there are applications out there which were designed to run from the command line (the UNIX-style "mail" command and beyond).

If you want anything specific please provide more details what you envision.

Comment 3

[hawat.thufir]

yes, rsx11m has it right.  I would like to read e-mail and write e-mail from the CLI with thunderbird.  Without launching the GUI.  It's just a feature request.  I wouldn't expect all the functionality, just basics.

From mailing lists, I know that others are frustrated with shortcomings in terms of IMAP configuration with CLI e-mail clients, whereas Thunderbird does this automagically.  There is a "market", so to speak, of users who want:

1.)  CLI
2.)  offline IMAP sync which Thunderbird offers


This is the context of the request.

Comment 4

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

It would probably be easier to write a patch for the command line clients than it would be to do so for Thunderbird. This is almost certainly WONTFIX.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Jim Porter (:squib) from comment #4)
> This is almost certainly WONTFIX.

I can't imagine us doing it either. Nor accepting code if it were written.  That's not where our market is at.

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Agreed, this isn't something we're gonna do.
I wonder if it's possible to do as an add-on... but e.g. our xpcshell tests run without gui, and they do exercise a lot of the code so some kind of non-gui access to tb mail reading should be possible given enough energy from some enthusiast.