How to view messageText table for command line or any tools

Thunderbird 3 or later uses SQLite3 to index mail body for "Gloda" full-text search. Gloda uses custom tokenizer "mozporter" to support non-ASCII characters. So when you open global-messages-db.sqlite, you cannot view a data into some tables such as messageText.

There is the way to view messageText table for command line version of SQLite3.

Before you try this, you should backup your database file!

1. Get the module address for porter tokenizer

   sqlite> select hex(fts3_tokenizer('porter'));
   00EF420A8C7F0000
   

2. Register dummy "mozporter" with same address of porter

   sqlite> select fts3_tokenizer('mozporter',X'00EF420A8C7F0000');

Then, you can view a data into messageText using SQL.

Checkout Thunderbird 3 repository

Build document in wiki.mozilla.org is too old. I explain enlistment of Thunderbird 3.

checkout comm-central repository

Thuderbird 3 / Seamonkey 2 repository is moved from cvs.mozilla.org to hg.mozilla.org.

$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/

checkout other project

Thunderbird 3 depends on mozilla-central and other project such as LDAP C-SDK. So you need checkout other projects

$ cd comm-central
$ python client.py checkout

Good luck!