1587088 - Feed accounts forced to bottom of list in Thunderbird 68

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1359410

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Tom Hughes]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0

Steps to reproduce:

Upgraded from Thunderbird 60 to Thunderbird 68.

Actual results:

My RSS feed account, which is listed first in the mail.accountmanager.accounts configuration option, moved from the top of the account list to the bottom, after the local mail account.

Expected results:

It should have stayed at the top.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Well, traditionally those feed accounts are at the bottom. Did you use an add-on to move it up? You can use the same add-on to move it up again.

Upgrade from TB 60 to TB 68 shouldn't change the account order unless there was something "special" in the original set-up. I've taken note of the issue, we'll see whether we get more reports.

Comment 2

[Tom Hughes]

Yes I used https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/manually-sort-folders/ but I believe that the account ordering feature there just provides a UI for manipulating that configuration variable?

Comment 3

[Andreas Gryphius]

I can confirm that ordering behavior has changed with recent TB versions (68) .
My user agent is "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.1.1 Lightning/68.0".

I noticed when going from 68.1.0 to 68.1.1 . I used to have "Local folders" on top, now they're fixed at second last position, right before my feed accounts. And this is even I manually put the "local folder"-account at the very first in user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "accountX,accountY,...") and user_pref("mail.accountmanager.defaultaccount", "accountX"); . Editing is done via about:config or directly in prefs.js (latter with TB shut down).
Ordering for my other accounts is working according to mail.accountmanager.accounts .
Could be that only "special" accounts with no own identity linked (dont know the exact english wording) are affected by this bug.

Did not find this bug report while searching for "local folders" or "ordering" or the like. That might lead to duplicate reports (as feeds might be not that common as local folders ;) ) ...

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Aceman, any comment here?

Comment 5

[:aceman]

I'd guess the addon Manually sort folders just stopped working in TB68, as it wasn't yet updated for it and thus the account order reset to the default imposed by Thunderbird. Feeds/RSS account is supposed to be on the bottom of the list, so there is no actual bug here.
See bug 1359410 for more details, which you can support as an enhancement request. Thanks.

Comment 6

[Tom Hughes]

Actually the addon has been updated because it was disabled until I updated it to get the new TB68 compatible version... It may of course be that the updated version doesn't work fully for some reason.

Having looked at it some more I believe the ability to pull local folders or feeds to top depends on the the ability to mark them as the default which seems to be a known issue in TB68 and https://github.com/protz/Manually-Sort-Folders/issues/86#issuecomment-533914758 actually suggested opening a bug here.

Comment 7

[:aceman]

Yes, that is part of the problem. Local folders must not be the default account and the addon doing that in the previous versions was an illegal action. If we prevented that now, I'm only happy.

But in bug 1359410 I offer a way to allow the addon to reorder accounts cleanly without making illegal settings of the default account, but the bug author didn't use the possibility yet.

Comment 8

[Andreas Gryphius]

I do not use any addon (except Lightning calendar).
I used to set the order of accounts in prefs.js using "mail.accountmanager.accounts" and "mail.accountmanager.defaultaccount" .
I have
accountX as my "Local Folders"
accountY1 as my "IMAP-Folder Y1"
accountY2 as my "IMAP-Folder Y2"
accountY3 as my "IMAP-Folder Y3"
accountZ as my "Feeds Folder (RSS)"

This setting in prefs.js used to work before TB681.1 :
user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "accountX,accountY2,accountY3,accountY1,accountZ");
user_pref("mail.accountmanager.defaultaccount", "accountX");
resulting in the following order of appearance

• "Local Folders"
• "IMAP-Folder Y2"
• "IMAP-Folder Y3"
• "IMAP-Folder Y1"
• "Feeds Folder (RSS)"
  So, "Local Folders" at first/top , then IMAP folders in expected order, then (last) "Feeds".

Then in TB681.1 ( without changing of prefs.js !) the order of appearance is

• "IMAP-Folder Y2"
• "IMAP-Folder Y3"
• "IMAP-Folder Y1"
• "Local Folders"
• "Feeds Folder (RSS)"

Okay, I read " ... Local folders must not be the default account ..." and I change
user_pref("mail.accountmanager.defaultaccount", "accountX");
to
user_pref("mail.accountmanager.defaultaccount", "accountY3");
and leaving "mail.accountmanager.accounts" unchanged, "accountX,accountY2,accountY3,accountY1,accountZ".
Surprisingly in TB681.1 this leads to the following order of appearance:

• "IMAP-Folder Y3"
• "IMAP-Folder Y2"
• "IMAP-Folder Y1"
• "Local Folders"
• "Feeds Folder (RSS)"

I would expect from my settings to get this order

• "Local Folders"
• "IMAP-Folder Y2"
• "IMAP-Folder Y3"
• "IMAP-Folder Y1"
• "Feeds Folder (RSS)"

Please explain how to achieve my expected behavior (order of folder appearance)?

And the bug report opener (Tom) was wondering how to get the feeds folder at the top of folder list. Maybe someone can show how to manage this.