It would be quite lovely if someone were to port the Sync on Arrival extension to Thunderbird 2. I've finally had to leave behind Thunderbird 1.5 because there are no more security updates for it, but the lack of this extension makes actually using IMAP a miserable experience.
I'll trade either review time or money (up to $20) for said update.
Posted by bzbarsky at June 20, 2008 12:04 AM | TrackBackI've been using it with the version requirement bumped for a very long time now. It seems to work, did I miss something?
Posted by: Gijs on June 20, 2008 2:26 AMCan the "mail.server.xxxNN.autosync_offline_stores" pref, and setting "Select this folder for offline use" in the properties of the folders you need most help you a bit?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Offline_folders#AutoSync
http://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Better_Faster_IMAP_Plan
Is it just the headers you want or the bodies too? (I think headers you can force by turning off IDLE support, mail.server.*.use_idle preference.)
Posted by: Neil on June 20, 2008 3:52 AMCould you explain your needs and which problem does this extension solve ?
Without this extension, I mark for offline use all my folders with thunderbird 2. It seems to work well (When a mail arrive and a thunderbird filter move it to a folder, I can access to it offline even if I didn't go to this folder while online)
Gijs, I tried that, but I'm not entirely sure it works. It's hard to tell, of course. But things still seem laggy...
matp75, my need is that when I switch from one mail to another I don't have to wait several seconds for the body to appear. That's the behavior I see without this extension. Since this extension downloads the body to the local cache when the mail comes in, the switch was instantaneous in Thunderbird 1.5. I'd like the same with Thunderbird 2.0.
Basically, right now it takes me about twice as long to get through my bugmail with Thunderbird 2.0 as it did with Thunderbird 1.5.
Posted by: Boris on June 20, 2008 7:27 AMThe trouble is that this extension is not open, so whilst it would not be very difficult to update it to TB 2.0, it's not legally possible ?
You'd have to rewrite it from scratch to be clean ; I did open the code, it's not that big, but it would already take some time to redo it, especially handle special cases as correctly as currently done.
Can the author be contacted to get his agreement to release it as open source ?
Well, I did some more testing and it seems that bumping the maxVersion does "work" in that the bodies are in fact downloaded. 2.0 is still a lot more laggy than 1.5, though. :(
Thomas, I'll try your suggestion and see where it gets me.
Posted by: Boris on June 20, 2008 10:03 AMWe're actually working to make Tb3 even less laggy than Tb 1.5. Emre's working on the same kind of functionality as SyncOnArrival, we already have nice fast asynchronous deletes, and we're planning on doing a bunch of other things (asynchronous sends, partial downloads, etc.). See the "better faster imap" link above.
Short version: We'd love your feedback on nightlies if you're up to it.
Posted by: David Ascher on June 20, 2008 10:50 AMhttps://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436615
is the bug to track, for this particular feature.
Posted by: David Ascher on June 20, 2008 10:57 AMDavid, I might try the nightlies, but they worry me: losing e-mail is sort of a non-option....
Posted by: Boris on June 20, 2008 3:14 PM