1383530 - Lightning prevents RSS feed subscription = "The Feed URL is not authorized"

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[WD]

I'm using 52.2.1 (64-bit) on MacOS, and I cannot subscribe to the http://bloomfieldnow.org/feed/ RSS feed.

Steps to reproduce:
1. In Thunderbird, go to Manage Subscriptions for Blogs and RSS Feeds
2. Enter http://bloomfieldnow.org/feed/
3. Click add
4. Repeat steps 1-3 with the Lightning add-on disabled.


Actual results:
Thunderbird reports "The Feed URL is not authorized" if Lightning is enabled, but works fine when it's disabled.

Expected results:
The feed can be subscribed to, regardless of Lightning.

Comment 2

[Eric Moore]

This bug report was essentially closed by marking it as "resolved duplicate" of another bug report. If the older bug report was being worked on that would be fine. However, it was marked "resolved invalid" 10 months ago due to lack of additional information from the author. 

I believe marking this bug report as "resolved duplicate" (even though its a duplicate) is a mistake as it effectively means the problem is being treated as WON'T FIX without anybody explicitly making that decision in any of the bug reports.  

There is somebody else in http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=3031947 who has a similar problem under Linux. I could not duplicate the problem using the same RSS feed while using ReminderFox (a different calendar add-on) under Windows 10 

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1306952#c4 mentions "The Thunderbird user agent string is changed with the addition of Lightning, and the server breaks on that." My Thunderbird user agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.2.1. Apparently ReminderFox doesn't modify it like Lightning does.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

There is not much point to this bug. The server blocks TB, see error console:
2017-07-24 09:33:17 Feeds INFO Feed.onDownloaded: request errType:errName:statusCode - Network:NetworkError:403
and there is nothing we can do about that.

People have complained about this before and I suggested to contact the feed administrator, which has in some cases resolved the problem.

What can TB do if servers don't allow it as client? Bug 1306952 comment #4 has a workaround.

Also see bug 1355733 and bug 1344513 comment #13 and further down.

Comment 4

[Eric Moore]

Please explain why modifying Lightning to not modify the user agent string is out of the question.

Comment 5

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

It's not out of the question, but why can't affected users not just clear pref calendar.useragent.extra?

If a site blocked Thunderbird altogether, would you then lobby for changing TB's useragent string to "Google Chrome"?

Philipp, do you want to action this?

Comment 6

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

I don't see a reason to make changes here. If Lightning is removed from the UA, then admins that really want to block will just block the corresponding TB version. Including Lightning would allow hotfixes in case of any Lightning-specific issues.

Comment 7

[Massimiliano Caniparoli]

Hi all,
I came after getting the same error on my Win10/TB 56.0b3 and seeing https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/1166672.
I have some doubts about your answers:
1) an everyday not-advanced user wouldn't search the web for why his TB doesn't accept a certain RSS feed (and the notification is very fast); he would just think "TB sucks".
2) what's the matter with Lightning? Why should TB request an RSS feed by sending Lightning "extra" useragent?
3) what is the side effect in clearing calendar.useragent.extra?