1400507 - Movemail account does not get new message

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[solitone]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.86 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1) Setup postfix for local mail only, delivering mail to mbox file: ~/mail/Inbox. It works and I can read local emails with mutt for instance.
2) Created a movemail account in Thunderbird (v. 52.3.0), pointing to local directory ~/mail.
3) Sent a new email to my mbox from the command line (with mailx, for instance). The new email is delivered and I can read it with mutt.



Actual results:

Thunderbird's movemail account does not get the new email, even if I press the Get Messages button. I can get the new email only if I:
1) either restart Thunderbird;
2) or I repair the Inbox folder (right click on the Inbox folder -> Properties -> Repair Folder).


Expected results:

Thunderbird should get the new email in the Inbox without requiring a restart or a repair.

The same issue is described in point #1 here [1], as well in message #9 here [2].

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/301988/using-movemail-with-thunderbird-on-ubuntu
[2] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=3028334

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

What's Movemail? Never heard of it. Looks like some old unsupported feature:
http://www-archive.mozilla.org/mailnews/movemail/

We won't spend developer time on this unless you submit a patch. In this case we can review it.

Aceman, you've been around for a long time, what do you know about Movemail?

Comment 2

[:aceman]

Yes, Movemail is an old Unix way of getting mail. A running server process delivers it into /var/spool/mail/<user> and then the apps like 'pine', 'mutt' or Thunderbird fetch it from there (so they do not need to talk POP3 natively).
TB still supports this method and I even improved some code in it. It is actually a very easy protocol.
But you can only choose this account type under linux that is why you don't see it.

Comment 3

[:aceman]

(In reply to solitone from comment #0)
> 1) Setup postfix for local mail only, delivering mail to mbox file:
> ~/mail/Inbox. It works and I can read local emails with mutt for instance.
> 2) Created a movemail account in Thunderbird (v. 52.3.0), pointing to local
> directory ~/mail.

So how did you point TB to read from ~/mail/Inbox? AFAIK it is designed to read new mail from /var/spool/mail/<user> file and move it to its internal Inbox (e.g. at ~/.thunderbird/<profile>/Mail/<servername>/Inbox) .

Comment 4

[solitone]

Hi :aceman, 

you're right, TB reads new mail from /var/spool/mail/<user> and moves it to ~/.thunderbird/<profile>/Mail/<servername>/Inbox. I reconfigured postfix (the mail user agent I use) to deliver my local mails to /var/spool/mail/solitone, and I left the Local Directory setting in TB untouched, and now everything works as expected. Unfortunately the info I gathered was misleading, and led me to this error of pointing TB's local directory to the directory containing the mailbox file written by postfix.

BTW, can I ask you what's the purpose of the Local Folders account? I would expect this account serves the purpose of accessing local mails in /var/spool/mail/<user>.

Cheers!

Comment 5

[:aceman]

No, the Local folders account does not relate to the /var/spool/mail method of delivery (which only exists on Linux).
It is used for various purposes inside TB and also for the user. It is automatically created so that we can be sure there is at least one account that can store messages offline. E.g. some users prefer co copy all messages from multiple POP3 accounts into it. Or you can copy some messages from IMAP accounts for some local tasks (while offline). Or we use it when connection to IMAP is lost and we store your composed message there when it can't be stored into Drafts folder on the server.
So it is not bound to any incoming delivery of messages, it is just for some maintenance tasks.