Closed Bug 1625741 Opened 1 year ago Closed 3 months ago

remove movemail support

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Movemail, task, P2)

Product:
MailNews Core
Component:
Movemail
Type:
task

Tracking

(thunderbird_esr78 wontfix)

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED
Milestone:
87 Branch
Tracking Flags:
Tracking Status
thunderbird_esr78 --- wontfix

People

(Reporter: mkmelin, Assigned: mkmelin)

References

Details

Attachments

(1 file)

bug1625741_rm_movemail.patch
94.73 KB, patch
benc
: review+
Details | Diff | Splinter Review

Movemail seems missing from account setup since some months. Dunno why, but nobody complained either.

I think it's time we dropped support for it: it's only been available for linux and must by it's very nature be used by a very tiny part of our users.

Priority: -- → P1

I'm not very happy about the removal. While movemail may not be used much, it also wasn't too large code-wise and was quite simple to understand as a protocol (as there was no communication with the server).

Can we get any stats whether it is completely unused by people? If it works in TB68, nobody using it may have noticed it broke later.

Since we have so many users, there must be someone, somewhere using it. Unfortunately we don't yet have stats on that.
It's not huge code-wise no, but I don't think that's a good reason keeping it. Everything does take effort to maintain and that is time away from something else.

If keeping it involves UI complications it seems like an easy call to remove even if the actual code for it isn't that big. We have so many edge cases in our UI as it is.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #3)

Since we have so many users, there must be someone, somewhere using it. Unfortunately we don't yet have stats on that.
It's not huge code-wise no, but I don't think that's a good reason keeping it. Everything does take effort to maintain and that is time away from something else.

Someone, somewhere is using it and provided a patch in bug 1571633

And somehow it started working again... oh well. I still think we should remove it to be able to clean up the UI for setting up accounts. But not for 78.

Priority: P1 → P2
See Also: → 1683303

Telemetry showed this is basically unused indeed: only 0.0084% has an account set up.

That is a deceptive framing of the statistic, if it is based on all platforms. This is a linux only feature, so any honest analysis would state what percentage of linux accounts have a movemail account. Then, the absolute number of users who would be affected should be presented.

(In reply to alta88 from comment #8)

That is a deceptive framing of the statistic, if it is based on all platforms. This is a linux only feature, so any honest analysis would state what percentage of linux accounts have a movemail account. Then, the absolute number of users who would be affected should be presented.

Hard to agree with this, unless you are arguing Linux features deserve outsized support regardless of # of users. In any case, if you go by monthly user counts, we have ~180K Linux users(~1% of all) and 2101 of them have a movemail account in their profile. That only amounts to 1.17% of Linux users, and frankly, I would consider it to be a low number of users for an add-on, nevermind a core feature.

And of those globally(!!) 2101 users, there's no saying how many actually are using it - just that they once tried to set one up, maybe just to see what it was.

Comment on attachment 9204427 [details] [diff] [review]
bug1625741_rm_movemail.patch

Review of attachment 9204427 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

LGTM.

Are there any translated strings that need excising? (I'm guessing they're help separately and that there's already a mechanism for flagging up no-longer-required strings, but you never know...)
Attachment #9204427 - Flags: review?(benc) → review+

The included string were all I could find.

status-thunderbird_esr78: --- → wontfix
Target Milestone: --- → 87 Branch

Pushed by mkmelin@iki.fi:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/931a1fb770eb
remove movemail support. r=benc

Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 3 months ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
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