275131 - want cookies for RSS sites

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[Mikel Ward]

You are probably already aware, but I couldn't find any related bug:

To view the target location RSS articles refer to on some subscription services
such as The Age <http://feeds.theage.com.au/rssheadlines/top.rss>, the user
agent must support both JavaScript and cookies to store the
authentication/session information from the provider.

Unfortunately, I can't sign on to most articles referenced by the above URL (I
think a couple of the top stories are open to all, but most require a login), so
I suspect cookies support is neither enabled by default, nor enabled at all.

Naturally, it is desirable to be able to disable cookies for security or privacy
reasons, but I would like to see support available.

Some people also made related comments in bug 250931.

Comment 1

[Craig Emery]

From: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/

"By default, to protect your privacy, Thunderbird blocks cookies for all
messages. This behavior can be problematic for some RSS feeds that require
cookies. You can enable cookies by adding the line:
user_pref("network.cookie.cookieBehavior", 3); to your profile's prefs.js file."

Comment 2

[Mikel Ward]

Thanks, Craig.

When I first installed 1.0, I wasn't interested in RSS, so didn't remember that
part of the release notes.  When I was interested, I searched Bugzilla and
newsgroups, and a few people had said it was disabled at compile time, so wasn't
available even as a preference.

As with so many useful features in Mozilla products they don't have a
user-visible preference, so such queries and bugs are to be expected.  (Others
that I know of are: Checking all IMAP folders for new mail; Outlook LDAP address
books.)  I look forward to this making its way into the Options dialog.

Now, if only Thunderbird didn't insist on opening http URLs in a browser (from
within an RSS account, this doesn't seem like the most natural action), I could
even log in to the sites that need cookies!

This bug, as defined, appears to be invalid (->INVALID).

Time to go and find the other relevant bugs.

Comment 3

[Scott MacGregor]

re-opening. just because I release note something doesn't mean we don't intend
to fix it :). I can't find another bug so I'll use this one as the tracking bug. 

Comment 4

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: thunderbird specific cookie policy class

by default we deny all cookies.

if the msg URI being opened lives inside of an RSS account then we do allow the
default cookie accept behavior (which we default to p3p)

This makes cookies work for RSS, but there's still no way in the case of RSS
feeds that make you submit a user name and password to actually submit those
values since we don't support form submits. But you could copy your cookies
file from firefox into thunderbird (after logging into the site in firefox of
course) and we'll now use those cookies for RSS.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 170403 [details] [diff] [review]
thunderbird specific cookie policy class

sr=bienvenu, but can we make a utility method to find out if it's an rss
server? I suspect we do this in several places...

Comment 6

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: adjusted patch to use a shared helper method

David you've already reviewed this patch with the exception of the change to
nsMsgBaseUtils.h/.cpp which is where I moved the shared method to.

Comment 7

[Scott MacGregor]

checked in. You can now see htis working by copying your cookies file from
firefox into thunderbird and you'll see it works for RSS. 

Without form submit from tbird though you can't really do the initial 'rss
login' in tbird...

Comment 8

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 170403 [details] [diff] [review]
thunderbird specific cookie policy class

retroactive r+. thanks for making use of our nice cookie permission interface,
mscott ;)

Comment 9

[[e-mail]]

*** Bug 250931 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Albert Feller]

*** Bug 287410 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Rick Yorgason]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to be broken again in 1.5 Beta 2.

Comment 12

[jessestrachman]

I can't get this to work. Tried putting in cookies file from Firefox; no dice. Any chance at reopening this sucker? Or perhaps there is a forum post lurking somewhere with a description of a workaround for this problem?

Comment 13

[Scott MacGregor]

I just stepped through the debugger again and watched cookies get attached to the http request for the actual rss web page, I then watched the cookie get set in the cookies file as well. This still seems to be working.

1.8 branch, thunderbird 1.5 RC 1 build. 

Have a particular feed where cookies aren't being set properly? 

Note: we only set the cookie on the http request for the actual web page. It still gets denied for images and other sub document http requests. 

Comment 14

[Rick Yorgason]

I'm having trouble with our hidden forums at http://www.ldagames.com/forums/.  The normal rss feeds seem to get my cookies fine, but not the ones that need cookies for authentication.

Comment 15

[Scott MacGregor]

(In reply to comment #14)
> I'm having trouble with our hidden forums at http://www.ldagames.com/forums/. 
> The normal rss feeds seem to get my cookies fine, but not the ones that need
> cookies for authentication.
> 

I created a mozilla test account on ldagames.com/forums. I then logged into the forums using Firefox. I then copied my cookies from ldagames  into my Thunderbird cookies file, so my authentication cookies for ldagames are now there.

I then subscribed to the ldagames rss feed. I clicked on one of the articles in thunderbird and watched us attach my ldagames user cookie to the outgoing http request for the rss article.

I don't belong to any secret forums on that site so I couldn't test anything other than watching the site get my authentication cookie.

Comment 16

[Rick Yorgason]

The user mozillatest now has access (and moderator privilages) to the private Mozilla Test forum.

Comment 17

[JC Dill]

I'm confused as to why this bug is marked RESOLVED FIXED.  

It's still broken in TB 1.5.0.5 for Windoze.

It would be sweet if there was an option to configure Thunderbird to automagically use the cookies file from Mozilla.

Comment 18

[Frank I.]

I totally agree with JC Dill (post #17) that this is not fixed to a satisfying state for now even in TB 2.0!

There shall be a SIMPLE way of
  - either automatically looking into the Firefox cookies file
or
  - being able to specify login/password in TB directly which then also directly
    does the initial login and cookies management.