Stand-alone Sunbird cannot send e-mail notifications

[Tom Braun]

Hello!

Sunbird can send e-mail alerts when it is used as an extension within
Thunderbird. However, in the stand-alone version, even though it
offers that option in the event-creation dialog, it cannot actually
send those e-mails.

Any idea when this functionality would be made available for the
stand-alone version? Are there any plans for that already? Is there
a bugzilla entry about this?

Thanks!

Tom

[Simon Paquet]

Post by Tom Braun
Sunbird can send e-mail alerts when it is used as an extension within
Thunderbird. However, in the stand-alone version, even though it
offers that option in the event-creation dialog, it cannot actually
send those e-mails.

This is a known issue. See the bottom of
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird_download.html

[Tom Braun]

Post by Simon Paquet
This is a known issue. See the bottom of
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird_download.html

Yes, I know. I saw that, too. The question is whether anyone
is working on it, or if anyone knows if there is any progress
made?

Tom

[Pan Sola]

Post by Tom Braun

Post by Simon Paquet
This is a known issue. See the bottom of
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird_download.html

Yes, I know. I saw that, too. The question is whether anyone
is working on it, or if anyone knows if there is any progress
made?
Tom

The real issue is, if Sunbird has that capability, will it still be a "stand alone"
application?

The way I see it, it's not Sunbird that's lacking feature, but Thunderbird. TB
needs to add support so other programs can use it to automatically send out email
messages without user intervention (perhaps add a user control to decide which
programs can send auto-emails vial TB). When TB has that capability (and/or other
email clients have that capability, and there's a standard protocal between
applications for it), then it'll probably be rather trivial for Sunbird to implement
the email notification.

And I fear the TB developers will not care about this feature until after TB 1.0 is
out of the door )-:

[Tom Braun]

Post by Pan Sola
The real issue is, if Sunbird has that capability, will it still be a
"stand alone" application?
The way I see it, it's not Sunbird that's lacking feature, but
Thunderbird. TB needs to add support so other programs can use it to
automatically send out email messages without user intervention (perhaps
add a user control to decide which programs can send auto-emails vial
TB). When TB has that capability (and/or other email clients have that
capability, and there's a standard protocal between applications for
it), then it'll probably be rather trivial for Sunbird to implement the
email notification.

I think this should have nothing to do with TB. There are plenty of
programs in professional data centers that are required to send out
e-mail alerts. They are often even installed on various servers, or
monitoring appliances, and none of them needs to know anything about
the mail-client of choice of the system administrator. They all have
a little SMTP module (which is not that complex), you configure a mail-
server initially, and off you go.

If you want to be fancy, you could see if you can read the settings
from TB (if it is installed) and suggest some of the identities and/or
server settings from there, but that is only optional and not really
required for this to work.

Tom

[Eric Rizzo]

Post by Tom Braun

Post by Simon Paquet
This is a known issue. See the bottom of
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird_download.html

Yes, I know. I saw that, too. The question is whether anyone
is working on it, or if anyone knows if there is any progress
made?

There was some very detailed discussion about adding it to Sunbird back
in the beginning of August. I think some consensus about a general
strategy was reached, and I even downloaded what I thought was the
appropriate source code. But after an hour or two of trying to find my
way through it I had to give up. Paying work and the staleness of my C
and JavaScript skills were the reasons, although I know it is almost
trivial to write an SMTP client (which is all that is needed in SB).

I might still be able to help if someone can sort of jumpstart things by
finding the exact places where the outbound email "hooks" are.

HTH,
Eric