1772571 - Primary Password prompted for every single Mail Account

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Security, defect)

Description

[Bardo Nelgen]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS 12; rv:86.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/94.0

Steps to reproduce:

Launch the Thunderbird beta app on Mac OS 12.4 Intel.

Actual results:

Upon app launch I get prompted for my primary password once for every mail/news/whatever account.

Expected results:

I get prompted for my primary password upon app launch only once for ALL accounts and the current app session (which may actually be the main reason for using a primary password at all…).

This already has been the former default behavior until just a couple of versions ago.

Comment 1

[Bardo Nelgen]

Still this way in beta 8.

Comment 2

[Bardo Nelgen]

(In reply to Bardo Nelgen from comment #1)

Still this way in beta 8.

…of v102

Comment 3

[Lupin]

The problem exists in 102.0 (that seems to be out of beta) on MacOS 11.6.7 Big Sur, Intel. I had similar problem many years ago, but it asked for the primary password twice regardless of how many accounts are there. For the past several years, up to version 102 it was asking for the primary password just once, as expected.

Comment 4

[Lupin]

It was this one - bug 735667
but I also found another one that I have forgot about and that seems identical - bug 584014

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for reporting this. Please reference bugs as "bug nnnn" so that bugzilla links it.

1. Did you set mail.password_protect_local_cache to true? Ref Bug 1346268
2. Can you find the regression range please using https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/ ? It's slick and easy to use.

Thanks

Comment 6

[Bardo Nelgen]

Not aware to have changed mail.password_protect_local_cache . Never heard of it (yet).

https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/ unfortunately does not work for me:

The "Thunderbird"-Link re-directs to the regular TB download page.
Possibly due to my German IP address ?

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Bardo Nelgen from comment #6)

Not aware to have changed mail.password_protect_local_cache . Never heard of it (yet).

https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/ unfortunately does not work for me:

The "Thunderbird"-Link re-directs to the regular TB download page.

That's expected. It is not a link to the tools. Perhaps a better starting point is https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/quickstart.html

Comment 8

[Bardo Nelgen]

As far as I can isolate it with this method, the last version functioning as expected has been:

app_name: thunderbird
build_date: 2022-01-14
build_file: /Users/Bardo/.mozilla/mozregression/persist/2022-01-14--comm-central--thunderbird-98.0a1.en-US.mac.dmg
build_type: nightly
build_url: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/2022/01/2022-01-14-12-27-38-comm-central/thunderbird-98.0a1.en-US.mac.dmg
changeset: a3e5318a5c279242d6683859a5a01dd29954759f
repo_name: comm-central
repo_url: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central

Side note: There has been a change long ago, that when you cancel the first primary password dialogue after launch, it will still re-appear for every single account. You need to cancel them all one after another if you don't want to use the Primary Password.

Before that, after manually cancelling the first Primary Password prompt, you'd instead be asked for the Individual password to each account. (All, of course, only if auto-checking for new mail/news upon app launch is activated for the respective account…)

Possibly a similarly "safe" behaviour might be considered for the fix ?

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Is the regression cause identifiable with comment 8?

Comment 10

[Bardo Nelgen]

Was that to me ? If so, please explain.

If I remember correctly there have been various password-related changes at the time – including the re-naming from "master" to "primary" password. Tough, as I am not a programmer, I'm afraid my own insights will be limited here.

Comment 11

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

If in that timeframe, perhaps something from bug 1748341

Comment 12

[Bardo Nelgen]

Seems, this is fixed with beta 6.

Comment 13

[Bardo Nelgen]

103.0b6, that is.