Today is my first day working for Mozilla Messaging. This will be very different to my old job, for starters, I will be working from home (in the UK). However I’m looking forward to it, and I already have lots of things to do. Currently I have on my list:
- Address Book Reorganisation - Based on some ideas I put together, Joshua has already done a lot of work on actually implementing the first major parts of this. There’s more work on some of the interfaces to do, especially to support writeable LDAP directories. Once I’ve done that, I’ll blog a bit more about what we are doing and why.
- Password Manager in MailNews - currently, MailNews requires the old “wallet” password manager, this is largely unmaintained code, and we want to move to using toolkit’s password manager. I have already implemented the necessary interfaces in toolkit’s password manager, I now need to work on the required changes to MailNews to complete this.
- Automatic xpcshell unit testing - in the last few months, we have started adding some basic xpcshell unit tests to MailNews, however the SeaMonkey trunk tinderbox is the only one that runs these tests. We want to get the Thunderbird trunk tinderboxes running them as well, however that requires some issues fixing to do with the way Thunderbird is configured (because it is not a browser).
- Automatic UI and Performance testing - Additionally we want to expand the capabilities of MailNews to include Mochitests (or something similar) and performance testing. I think these will take some time to set up properly, but I wanted to let you all know we are thinking about them.
Alongside those items, I’ll also be handling most of the “normal” background tasks, e.g. reviews, bug fixes, backend-improvements, helping the community, helping on bug days etc.
There’s lots of work for me to do, so I’d better stop writing the blog and get on with it 
5 responses so far ↓
1 Jane Finette // Apr 7, 2008 at 11:41
Congrats Mark - and good luck on your first day!
2 Shawn Wilsher // Apr 7, 2008 at 12:47
Getting tests working and UI things landed is a big thing for me. I don’t want to use nightlies because mail is important to me and I don’t want some bug to wipe out my inbox. I suspect other folks might feel the same way.
Yet another benefit of tests!
3 Tomer Cohen // Apr 7, 2008 at 13:20
Good luck in your new job.
<bug promoting>
Please look at my bug report about server details auto-discovery. I think this feature would be nice to implement in Thunderbird 3.0, and it is not that hard to implement.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411898
http://tomercohen.com/2008/01/12/srv-records-for-mail-server-auto-discovery/
</bug promoting>
4 Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » Travel, Work and Other Updates // Apr 8, 2008 at 2:58
[…] great to see that Mark has started work with us. There’s lots to be done, especially on the address book, work that Joshua has developed in […]
5 Standard8 // Apr 8, 2008 at 7:18
@Tomer:
auto-discovery and related subjects have already been discussed at length on news://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird - I suggest you join the discussion there.