Closed Bug 1658862 Opened 4 years ago Closed 4 years ago

Prompt to install Owl does not mention that it is a paid, proprietary add-on

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: gbs, Assigned: BenB)

Details

Attachments

(1 file)

Attached image Thunderbird Owl prompt

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.2 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Start a new copy of Thunderbird, add an Exchange email address, and select the "Exchange" option

Actual results:

A message (screenshot attached) appears with the following text:

A third-party add-on can allow you to access your email account on this server:

Owl is an addon that allows you to access your email account on Exchange servers.

[Button labelled "Install"]

Nothing in this text suggests that I am installing a free trial of a paid add-on. The first indication of this is a banner, after the email account has been set up, that says "your trial of Owl expires in 14 days" (or something to that effect). This feels like something of a dark pattern, and is very surprising coming from an open source program.

Expected results:

The prompt to install Owl should be clear up-front about the cost, something like "Owl is an addon that allows you to access your email account on Exchange servers. It costs €10/year, and has a 14-day free trial."

Component: Untriaged → Account Manager

Exists in v68 also

Version: 78 → 68

I will change the text to include that it's paid. I cannot do it right now, because I'm on vacation, but I'll do it when I come back.

ACCEPTIng

Assignee: nobody → ben.bucksch
Status: UNCONFIRMED → ASSIGNED
Ever confirmed: true

Just for your information: There is a message right after install: Once you close the dialog, (and it's the first time you use Owl in this profile), we automatically open our website (in the browser), which shows that it's a paid addon and the exact price. We even try to show the price in your currency. You may have missed this, or there might be a problem with your system browser config.

That said, I agree to change also the text shown inside the dialog to mention that it's a paid addon. I will do that.

I have changed the text to mention explicitly that it's a paid addon.
FIXED

I have not included the exact price, because in part because the website calculates the price in the user's currency, based on his country. "Euro" doesn't mean much to an American or somebody from India. There are also other payment schemes, like domain licenses etc.

What as true and is still true:

  • The text in the TB dialog is a link, and a click for more info brings you to our website, where the price is listed
  • Immediately after you successfully install Owl with setup, we automatically open our website with the extension description and the price, to ensure that you know everything from the very start.
Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED

Marking invalid as this was not a problem/fix in the Thunderbird code, but in the add-on/website.

Resolution: FIXED → INVALID
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