1271964 - HTML composition setting changed during profile move to new machine

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[gingerling]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0
Build ID: 20160503092831

Steps to reproduce:

I have a new laptop, so I moved my tb profile (all of it) from old laptop to new one, and set the profile name in profile.ini file. Everything as normal except all my accounts were now set to compose in html where as on old machine they were all NOT html. 


Actual results:

I noticed as the formatting looked different, so I went into my account settings and each one had "compose message in html format" checked in the composition and addressing section. All other settings in accounts seem to be the same so far, only this setting changed.

Possible contribution variables (in my limited opinion/experience) 1) I use enigmail 2) the new laptop had the new release of TB and the old laptop had the old release.


Expected results:

I would expect this setting to be maintained during profile move.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

What exactly do you want the TB development team to do here?

I'm quite sure that we can't rebuild/retrace/reproduce what happened to you when you move from one machine to another, switching version in between and on top of that use Enigmail, that, as far as I know, has it's own ideas about mail format (but I'm not familiar with it).

HTML composition is the default in TB, so it could well be that Enigmail was configured differently on the new machine and didn't disable HTML composition.

So if everything is fine after manually correcting the setting that got lost, I'd close this bug. We have hundreds (not to say thousands) of bugs where a feature really doesn't work and which need attention of the very limited developer resources, so why would we look into such a minor problem that could be fixed by (un)ticking a box?

Having said that, here my personal experience: I have various machines and I copy profile data from one to another and I've never lost a bit. I also use about eight versions of TB and the profile data usually is maintained.

What you can do is inspect your prefs.js in your profile where the preferences are stored. The one that determines the composition type is:
  user_pref("mail.identity.id1.compose_html", false);

id1 changes depending on which identity your looking at. I doubt that without an add-on interfering, the value set there wouldn't be obeyed.

Comment 2

[gingerling]

I didn't assume that enigmail or whatever was a factor, just being through in my reporting. Just reporting what seemed to be a bug. I am not really experienced enough to try and replicate it in a "clean" testing scenario. Sounds like the "bug" must be specific to my set up though if you have never experienced it.