RealItem enum is missing MeetingRequest

[pschichtel]

I tried Thunderbird's EWS Support on current nightly, but unfortunately it's unable to fetch my messages. In thunderbird output I noticed this a couple of times:

[ERROR ews_xpcom::client] Request FAILED: failed to deserialize structure from XML
[ERROR ews_xpcom::client] an unexpected error occurred: Ews(Deserialize(Error { path: Path { segments: [Map { key: "Body" }, Map { key: "SyncFolderItemsResponse" }, Map { key: "ResponseMessages" }, Map { key: "SyncFolderItemsResponseMessage" }, Seq { index: 0 }, Map { key: "Changes" }, Map { key: "$value" }, Seq { index: 0 }, Enum { variant: "Create" }, Map { key: "$value" }] }, original: Custom("unknown variant `MeetingRequest`, expected `Message`") }))

Looking at common.rs' RealItem enum there is indeed only Message in there, the other variants including MeetingRequest are still missing.

I guess that the meeting related variants are pretty likely to show up for people using this in any professional capacity.

I would be able to submit a PR for the meeting related variants.

[babolivier]

Hey there, thanks for trying out the EWS support in Thunderbird!

While calendar support is planned as a future step (we're currently focusing on email), it looks like MeetingRequest and other meeting-related item types can indeed be used to represent messages in the EWS mailbox APIs, as you mentioned (and as per other reports I've seen).

Your offer to submit a PR is very welcome, feel free to look into it 🙂

I just want to caveat this by pointing out a PR in ews-rs on its own won't make meeting messages suddenly show up in Thunderbird, as Thunderbird uses an internal crate (called ews_xpcom) to interface between ews-rs and its own internals, which specifically expects to process only Message items. So this internal crate would need to be changed as well for a full support, though I don't think this change would be a very difficult one considering MeetingRequest & cie seem very similar to Message in their structure. This blog post contains some documentation on how the EWS Rust support is currently structured, and we plan on documenting this more in the near future).

If you don't feel like getting into the nitty-gritty of Thunderbird itself that's fine too! An ews-rs PR would be welcome regardless, and if you feel like you need help or pointers (either with ews-rs or Thunderbird), feel free to come and ask in the Thunderbird developers Matrix room, on the Thunderbird developers mailing list, or to reach out to me directly (either on Matrix or at brendan[at]thunderbird.net) - we'd be more than happy to help you get started 🙂

[babolivier]

Quickly following up on this @pschichtel, in addition to the resources I pointed out last month, we're now organising open office hours dedicated to Rust and its integration in Thunderbird: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/developers/T10239c4603d7b01f/thunderbird-rust-office-hours-1 (note the date is incorrect in the first message of the thread, and corrected below it).

If you're interested, feel free to join the call, or catch the recording if the time and date don't work for you or you'd rather watch it in your own time 🙂