Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 20/11/2018 15.04, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

As nospam wrote, clicking on the news URL should work.
It doesn't here.

Right click offers to open in browser, then a dialog ask to say what
application to open it with (choose other application). And it does not
suggest any by default, just the entire disk tree.
normal click, not contextual click, and the problem appears to be
thunderbird.
Yes, but the point is that not every NNTP client supports locating
"news://..." URLS. And it is demonstrated.
that just means you're using a broken news client. replace it with a
better one.

That's your opinion. Better one? Such as...? On Linux, remember.


I did some experiments on a modern copy of Firefox and Thunderbird.

In Firefox, I tried "news://12345678abcdef". A MID URI.

I see the network LED flash a tiny bit (only a few flashes).

Then Thunderbird pops to the front. And it stops.

If I were to enter "news://nntp.aioe.org" then Thunderbird
can pop to the front, and maybe a new account entry ends up
added to Thunderbird. This isn't a MID based search, so a
separate code path is being followed.

OK, in the first case, in Thunderbird, if I use the
Config Editor (otherwise known as about:config if I was
in Firefox), I see one entry in there for "messageid".

The string stored in the entry, is a groups google com search.

http://groups.google.com/blahblah%mid

It would seem that Thunderbird is not "arranged by MID" internally.
If you look at various search options within Thunderbird, the MID
is never an option in the searches. This is also why you end up reading
messages cross-posted to three groups, three times. Reading a message
with a particular MID, doesn't remove it from all groups it is crossposted to.

Thunderbird, when there's a handoff using news://URI in Firefox,
seems to be calling groups.google.com to look up a MID. Rather
than handle the MID with its own client-entered server details.
Since there's no MID engine, it bails and cheats by doing an HTTP
call instead.

Something is broken about that handling. It actually worked
in Seamonkey, which is a suite. But something in Thunderbird
is botching the information returned by the attempt
to access http://groups.google.com.

If you were to modify the messageid string in the Config Editor
in Thunderbird, you might get it working. I've run out of
things to try myself.

When I look in Seamonkey right now, it's set up the same way
as the Firefox/Thunderbird duo. Maybe this should be changed
to https, but it might not matter.

mailnews.messageid_browser.url string http://groups.google.com/search?as_umsgid=%mid

A bug report suggests the search string might have been intended to be

http://groups.google.com/search?as_umsgid=%mid&rnum=1

and yet another thread participant said the rnum was unnecessary.

So, the steps that seem to happen:

1) Firefox realizes it doesn't have a URI handler for news://
It knows there is a protocol binding for Thunderbird for that.
Maybe Thunderbird is registered as the email/news handler.
2) Thunderbird examines the incoming URI.
It successfully recognizes non-MID URIs and handles them as usual.
(In the same broken way it always had :-) )
3) When Thunderbird sees one with a MID (no angle brackets, no quotes),
it seems to resort to http. The LED for the NIC blinks a few times.
A manual test of the URL above, shows it can work. A result comes back.
4) But Thunderbird doesn't seem to be doing anything with the result.
I suspected a "popup preventer" entry in Config Editor, was preventing
the groups.google.com web page from being presented. That's what
would have happened in Seamonkey. My attempts to modify that, did not help.

There are two areas of experimentation:

1) Improve the messageid search command.
2) Remove whatever popup blocker prevents the gg page from displaying in TB.

As for the approach, it's kinda dumb. Not all newsgroups are
in Google Groups. The only reason the MID being used in this
thread was searchable, was because it was crossposted. A post
to only the Windows7 group, would not be held by Google. But
since the message went to three groups, the test message is
stored in groups.google.com because of some group other than
the windows7 one.

Paul