1802145 - Restore movemail / unix mailspool support in Thunderbird

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Movemail, task, P3)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1727931 +++

Let's use this bug for a clean start to restore movemail support in Thunderbird (courtesy of QA). It's up to devs if they want to do the work right here or use this as a meta bug. This bug is reserved for technical implementation - no advocacy please (which is already sufficiently present on Bug 1625741 Comment 15 ff and Bug 1727931).

(In reply to Ryan Lee Sipes from bug 1625741 comment #87)

Pulling this out was a mistake. I'm sorry that this decision was made and I'm here to remedy it. We're going to bring Movemail back. If someone here hits us with a patch, it will go faster. - Thunderbird Product Manager

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from bug 1625741 comment #88)

Let's see if we can simply back out this [bug 1625741] without too much trouble, otherwise we can create a patch that reverts the changes and uplift it to 102.
Gently pinging Ben and Geoff to see how doable this is.

(In reply to Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan) from bug 1625741 comment #95)

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #88)

Let's see if we can simply back out this without too much trouble, otherwise we can create a patch that reverts the changes and uplift it to 102.

No a simple backout won't work, there's quite a bit of front-end things that would need fixing up plus the XPCOM registration has changed. Also the strings are gone.

---

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open Thunderbird and fetch mail

Actual results:

After the latest update to Thunderbird 91 my localhost mailbox disappeared and I couldn't fetch internal linux system mail anymore. It seems movemail has been removed from Thunderbird, why????!!!! Stripping anything that isn't used much will not help Mozilla in the long run.

Expected results:

Movemail should have stayed, it is still used by many Linux users. But it is also very annoying that the localhost mail folder containing old system mails was dropped, it should still be visible since it is a mailbox

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #0)

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1727931 +++

Let's use this bug for a clean start to restore movemail support in Thunderbird (courtesy of QA). It's up to devs if they want to do the work right here or use this as a meta bug. ...

(In reply to Ryan Lee Sipes from bug 1625741 comment #87)

Pulling this out was a mistake. I'm sorry that this decision was made and I'm here to remedy it. We're going to bring Movemail back.

Comment 2

[Philippe Lefèvre]

This story is incredibly stupid and no one at Thunderbird or Mozilla takes the time to explain where the problem is, what the official decision is, whether this bug is going to be fixed or not!
I'm tired of waiting, I just switched very easily but with regret, from Thunderbird 102.5 to a patched Betterbird 102.5 (BB is a fork or a clone of TDB. Next BB release should include the patch) and everything is fine now (even access to Google calendars works!)

Comment 3

[Rowan Thorpe]

Having engaged in thread 1625741 which states to continue on thread 1727931 I just commented there after searching and finding the reinstatement patch in Betterbird's repo. That patch should provide at least some value either as a copy-paste shortcut or at least for reference. My comment was probably more appropriate for this thread though (implementation, not advocation). Anyway, am linking it here & quoting it below.

---

(In reply to plelivel from comment #23)

That is good news. As the Thunderbird fork 'Betterbird' already restored Movemail successfully in a recent build, I think it should be possible to merge that code with Thunderbird quite easy.

I had a quick look at the Betterbird Github repo and found the following:

• The patch to reinstate movemail (on Thunderbird ESR 102 code) is:
  • https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-patches/blob/20beb9022ff3429219873536cadd347bd684e413/102/bugs/1728778-reestablish-movemail.patch
  • https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr102/
• A search for "movemail" in that repo finds that patch and also several Windows (cmd) scripts for reinstating translations of the movemailCantOpenSpoolFile string, so I guess that must have been dropped from language-files - only for Windows? - at some point too...:
  • https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-patches/search?q=movemail

Comment 4

[b6]

... also several Windows (cmd) scripts for reinstating translations ...

Those scripts provide additional strings during repacking for the various languages. Movemail strings were removed from the L10N repo in a general purge of no-longer-used strings, for example here:
https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/de/rev/db3369a62402dce48cdfbc61add35a34270124b5#l83.12
https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/it/rev/4a0ad63858a5bbc11538a0e06d3e1dd9304c845c#l83.12
https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/ja/rev/78521dfda581a3ab4b2b9e8472950eeea17518dc#l20.12

Comment 5

[Philippe Lefèvre]

Is there any roadmap or report somewhere about the current fix of this bug ?