User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:87.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/87.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open Thunderbird Beta.

Run this command from a terminal:

thunderbird -mail 'mid:f8051cc8637cf3ff79661f382.63e939ed07.20201229132457.576ef659f7.6f044b64@mail65.atl231.mcsv.net'

Actual results:

No change in message focus.

Got an "Unrecognized URL" message in the error console:

Unrecognized URL: mid:f8051cc8637cf3ff79661f382.63e939ed07.20201229132457.576ef659f7.6f044b64@mail65.atl231.mcsv.net

Expected results:

The email with that message ID should be focused. In my account, this would give the same result as running with the 'imap-message://' URL, e.g.

thunderbird -mail 'imap-message://nathanielmbeaver%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/INBOX#45745'

Background:

Support for mid: URLs was recently added to Thunderbird: bug 264270

However, currently there is no mechanism to active mid: URLs from outside of Thunderbird as was possible with e.g. the -thunderlink flag. The -mail <URL> flag currently supports these URL schemes:

mailbox-message://
imap-message://
news-message://

This is a feature request to support mid: URLs with the -mail flag also.

This will require changes to mailnews/base/src/MailNewsCommandLineHandler.jsm, linked below.

Reproduced on Thunderbird version 88.0b2.

Relevant links:

https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/5f22b6e291147d416c78756910ab2e91761c5ee7/mailnews/base/src/MailNewsCommandLineHandler.jsm#45

https://superuser.com/questions/701887/using-the-thunderbird-command-line-how-can-i-open-a-specific-email-by-message-i

I tested just now, the -mail flag is not needed, thunderbird mid:id@mail.net style works for me.

Thanks, that works. If not using the -mail flag is intentional, I am fine with closing the bug as-is, although it would be nice if this behavior were documented somewhere.

I think it's intentional, it is similar to thunderbird x.eml or thunderbird y.ics.