Adventures in Rust: Bringing Exchange Support to Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

22 points·ktosobcy··6 comments

I want more integrated office support in Linux. I am happy with any and all attempts that can improve it.

On the rust side, it doesn't seem like they have gotten to benefit too much from the ecosystem yet (one crate for XML deserialization). But I am sure now that it will come with time.

Looks like the ecosystem might benefit from them rather than the other way round: having a crate that fully supports XML serialization/deserialization, including all of XML's features (attributes, namespaces etc.) sounds like a win for Rust. Actually, I would have expected something like that to exist already - XML might not be the hottest data exchange format around anymore, but it's still pretty widespread...

XML support is noticably sparse. Yaserde is there but support for schema to rust generation is lacking and what is there isn't in crates.io and the repos abandoned. It is quite possible I'm missing some Wonderful crate, but I haven't found it with concerted effort. But I'm not the person who needs it enough to finish the job. It may simply be that person doesn't exist. Migration to json schemas is pretty easy unless you are using the sorts of things people don't like about xml anyway.

evolution, while perhaps not as fashionable as thunderbird, has had very good support for exchange for a long time.

(evolution-ews should be packaged for your distribution)

I have tried thunderbird meant times, but it never work well for me.

The mbox based storage format simply don't scale

It can also use Maildir since quite some time...

Did you try with local mailboxes thus, rather than server-side IMAP?

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