Feature request: Enable searching by Message-ID

[xmontero]

Hello all!

Let's go for the next level.

I think it's time to think if this plugin should "only" be a "Message-ID" copier, or it must go beyond.

The fact is that if one indexes all the emails programmatically, one can find an email by Message-Id.

But... what about this situation?

Step 1) Filling-in a CRM you say "I got this PDF in email Message-ID: 1234@abcd"
Step 2) One week later, this email is not yet processed by the software indexing the emails for any reason. But you need to "locate" the email with id "1234@abcd".
Step 3) One goes to the "Search box", tries to search Message-ID: <1234@abcd>, <1234@abcd> and 1234@abcd all of them with no lock.

I wonder if instead of "copy-message-id" this plugin could work also as a "search-message-id" service.

I have no idea on how the indexing, search and extension of the search work in Thunderbird.
I have no idea too, Joshua, if this makes sense to you... ie: Get the Message-ID + be able to use the Message-ID instead of only the half.

But if you want I'm ready to help if you give me the pointers on where to start.

[xmontero]

I mean:

Copy works:

This copied the ID "message-id:<[email protected]>"

Would be lovely to be able to "use" the result:

But it gives an empty set.

[xmontero]

Any thoughts about this feature?

[xmontero]

Any news on this thoughts?

[garoose]

Sorry I haven't responded. That does sound very cool, I just haven't had any time for a while to work on this. If you wanted to do preliminary research into how I would integrate with the search bar that would definitely help, but I still can't promise when I would get to this. Have you looked for other plugins that allow you to search headers too? I found this one, it claims to have a header regex search, but it's possibly outdated https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmailui/.

[xmontero]

Hey, I haven't done any research as I first wanted to know it youu'd like to integreate it.

If your vision of this project was "no way, it'll copy but not search" I did not want to loose time.

On the other hand if you said "That does sound very cool" (as it is the case!!!) then I don't mind doing research, creating a parallel small testing project, trying it and then working on this to do a PR finally.

I just did want to ensure you'd be happy with this feature inside this project.

Provided you are, as per your comment, I will do some research and I'll let you know when I have something.

I'll start looking at the projects you point out.

[xmontero]

Hey Joshua! I'm a bit lost in the sequence of commits... I see there are commits by you in my fork, in the branch "raw-copy". To try develop this feature, I'm going to build on top of your master branch. This means that branch raw-copy will become orphan.

I don't know if we need to rescue anything from there. Would it be possible that you take a look to those commits to see if it's worth keeping the branch or discarding completely it?

[garoose]

Hey Joshua! I'm a bit lost in the sequence of commits... I see there are commits by you in my fork, in the branch "raw-copy". To try develop this feature, I'm going to build on top of your master branch. This means that branch raw-copy will become orphan.

I don't know if we need to rescue anything from there. Would it be possible that you take a look to those commits to see if it's worth keeping the branch or discarding completely it?

Sorry it took me a few days to look at this, it looks like I squashed those commits together when I brought them to master so you can safely discard them, thanks for checking!

[xmontero]

Deleted raw-copy in my fork to avoid confusion. Re-synchronized my fork to your master.

[xmontero]

Cross-referenced here: https://support.mozilla.org/es/questions/1306705

[xmontero]

Cross-reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544805 - In this forum someone asks to open an email by Message-ID from the command line.

Link from where get possible potential inspiration: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/thunderlink/ - Referenced in the forum. Unfortunately ThunderLink stopped working at API v68. But maybe there's something useful in the source code to be explored.

[xmontero]

Cross-reference: https://github.com/CamielBouchier/cb_thunderlink - This has been linked in this answer https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544805#c6

Worth exploring.

[nbeaver]

I know this isn't the same as searching, but for what it's worth you can open mid: URLs in Thunderbird 87.0 and later. For example, this will work in Thunderbird 91.x release series:

thunderbird mid:[email protected]

Internal links in, say, the body of an email are working in Thunderbird's latest beta version and might be backported to a release. So you could write an email to yourself that included mid URLs and then click on them to open them, effectively a locally hyperlinked inbox. People have been wanting this for a long time, and now it's finally here.

The mid: URL scheme is defined in RFC2392. Before its untimely loss of compatibility with Thunderbird version 78.x, the Thunderlink add-on supported mid: URLs as well as a few other schemes.