To Do List
The To Do List is now obsolete. We have made excellent progress in recent Mozilla Thunderbird milestone releases. At this time we are no longer keeping track of work items in this To Do List. We now use Bugzilla to track open issues with Mozilla Thunderbird.
As mentioned on the main Thunderbird project page, our first goal is to drive towards a 0.1 release for stand alone mail based on work in Mozilla 1.5. Our short term goals are geared towards making that a reality. The to do list will also include bugs and problems folks identify with Thunderbird once we release our first test build to the public. Please check the recent changes list to make sure some of these tasks have not been done already.
Short Term To Do List
These are not necessarily ordered by priority
There are reports that we aren't getting localstore.rdf out of thunderbird\defaults properly for new profiles. This means we aren't remembering window position correctly. If you run into this, copy localstore.rdf from the defaults directory into your profile directory.SOCKS support works in thunderbird but http and ssl proxies don't seem to be working. Need to figure out why.- Re-implement mail specific context menus. Particularly the message pane context menu which uses contentAreaContextOverlay.xul/nsContextMenu.js which hides and shows a bunch of browser specific context menu items. Remove both of these files from thunderbird and replace with customized mail versions.
- Need build config options for building Thunderbird extensions in mail/extensions. For instance "--enable-mail-extensions=offline smime"
Thunderbird needs to register HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto on Windows to make sure Mozilla Firebird launches Thunderbird as the default mailto handler. (Bug #202497)Add hooks for mailnews to handle command lines news and snews urls (also, add registry hooks)We need a linux guru to implement nsIExternalProtocolService::loadUrl for linux. Without this, we don't load http urls (and other non mail urls) in the default browser like we should. I'm not sure what the OS integration hooks are for Linux to implement this routine. It problable depends on the desktop environment being used? (Bryner might have something for this for gnome)Fix xremote for Thunderbird on Linux. Currently it interferes with firebird on Linux because we think we can bring up navigator and composer chrome.Add support for inserting the signature in the same spot as the reply insertion point (Bug #62429).- Remove all references to contextHelp.js from the mail chrome. We may be taking a perf hit as I see errors about not being able to find this file in Thunderbird. Removing the chrome that attempts to load this might give us a boost.
- Make View Source launch a text version of the file in notepad (or whatever the default text viewer is)
- Audit major XUL files in the chrome like threadPane.xul and folderPane.xul, removing unnecessary CSS files like fakeAccount.css
Investigate a new theme to replace classic. For 0.1 this might just mean getting some new toolbar icons and dumping them onto the branch's classic theme. (Arvind is going to help with this)- Add an auto save feature to mail compose to automatically save messages as draft every few minutes.
- Remove or hide help buttons since we won't have a help viewer.
Add pref UI for clearing out remembered passwords to the advanced prefs panel.Currently, blocking of remote images is broken. That's because the image privacy manager currently lives in extensions\cookies and we don't build the cookies extension in thunderbird. Either we need to look into breaking the image manager out of cookies or we need to cobble up a thunderbird specific image blocking manager. One advantage of the later approach is that we could then block loading of remote images for messages identified as junk.Add default values to localstore.rdf for address book picker columns.Get the file picker working correctly for linux.Need a new example theme icon that shows mail instead of browser chrome.Add default values to localstore.rdf for address book columnsAdd an information dialog that explains junk mail controls and comes up the first time the user trys to use junk mail. This will act like the popup blocking dialog in Mozilla Firebird.Find a volunteer to produce unix versions of ThunderbirdFind a volunteer to produce mach-o versions of ThunderbirdAdd an about thunderbird dialog to the help menu.Need About Thunderbird logo (Jason Kersey is working on this)Continue work to stop building modules we don't need in stand alone but a browser would (gopher, ftp, etc).Remove plugins and JAVA code from the build. (Done via mail/config code)Need .ico art work for windows desktop icon. Currently using the firebird/mozilla .ico file. (Jason Kersey)Reports of Thunderbird not working if you don't have a mozilla profile already installed on the machine. This may go away when we move to Thunderbird profiles. (mscott fix in hand) (Bug #201891Progress meter isn't getting hidden when we aren't showing any progressRename Preferences to Options and move the menu item to ToolsCustomizeable toolbars. (back port to the mozilla/xpfe toolkit)Make classic the default themeTools / Import isn't brining up the mail import dialog.Examine the existing prefs UI and prune out items that don't make sense in stand alone mail such as the Advanced / System panel.The column header for the folder pane tree shows a twisty which makes you think you can sort it even though you really can't. There should be a way to make sure we don't show the sort indicator on this tree.Get Mach-o and unix builds off the groundAre there any mail fixes on the Mozilla 1.4 trunk that we want to back port to our 0.1 branch? Might be some junk mail improvements we are going to want.Make the mail start page and the throbber url point to the Thunderbird project page
Long Term To Do List
- Convert mailnews to use static atoms for a nice performance and footprint win which will benefit Thunderbird and mozilla mail. See Bug #201561.
How are we going to download new themes? Without a browser, we don't have any browser chrome to show a list of themes in. How do we direct a user to a Thunderbird themes page, and allow them to download a new theme for Thunderbird?Collapse overlays for a performance win. (Stephen Walker has begun this work for address book and mail compose)- remove remaining dependencies on chrome in mozilla/editor and mozilla/xpfe
Develop the notion of extensions used by Mozilla Firebird. Move features like smime, offline and return receipts to download able extensions.- Put together a Thunderbird installer which leverages the GRE.
- Move to the new mail compose UI designed by blake (Bug #146259).
- Resolve Mozilla GRE issues so we can play nice and leverage the GRE. Does this mean we'd need an installer? Work with the Mozilla Firebird folks so we can both use the GRE, reducing the download size of both our applications. This also means cleaning up the thunderbird ifdef in nsWebShell so we can use the GRE.
Work with Mozilla Firebird developers to add Send Page functionality to Mozilla Firebird.Add mail/config directory to thunderbird which knows how to put together just the required thunderbird libraries and chrome.Merge all of the mail DLLs into a single DLL for a footprint and performance win. See Bug #179533.Move off our branch and onto the trunk. To minimize impact on the trunk this means moving Thunderbird work into mozilla/mail. Porting the build config changes to the mozilla trunk. And forking all XUL/JS files that we modify. The goal is to minimize impact on the trunk and have as much as possible in our new mozilla/mail directory.Once we are synched up with the trunk, we are going to move to the new toolkit and follow the UI practices of Mozilla Firebird.Continue removing unnecessary chrome and modules from the Thunderbird build.