Closed Bug 1961236 Opened 1 month ago Closed 1 month ago

command line argument while starting thunderbird to open profile in readonly mode

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Untriaged
Version:
Thunderbird 137
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
VERIFIED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: hgkamath, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:137.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/137.0

Steps to reproduce:

request for enhancement:

A command line argument while starting a thunderbird profile to open the profile in read-only mode that

  • does not allow any changes to the mbox folders
    • no drafting, composing, deleting, moving, creating new folders etc
  • perhaps only allows temporary indexes to be built/rebuilt
  • does not allow any major high level changes to the settings, like adding accounts,
    • but does allows maybe changes to settings pertaining to view preferences, search, and the like.

I am using thunderbird profiles to archive older emails.
thunderbird -offline -profile $ScriptDir/$tbprofilepath

An option could be
thunderbird -offline --readonly -profile $ScriptDir/$tbprofilepath

Actual results:

Sometimes, I while looking into the profile with archived email folder, I may accidentally or intentionally change something and later wish it never happened.

Expected results:

A profile opened in readonly mode will preclude the possibility of changes to such email profiles used for archiving.

  • Related questions:
    • Will thunderbird work as expected, that is open the profile and allow the user to browse/search the email folders of the profile.
      • (Q1) if the thunderbird folder was hosted on a readonly filesystem (iso9660) or a public location without write permissions?
      • (Q2) if a user removes all write file-permissions chmod u-w,g-w,o-w -R profile1 on all-files/or only the mbox-files contained in the thunderbird folder

Sorry that would be far too much work for such an obscure use case.
We have lots and lots of profile data that needs to be able to be read and written to.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 1 month ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
  • usually such email local-folder profiles are opened several years/months apart, as they are not a daily-driver.
    • In that time, even thunderbird software would have upgraded by a few version releases
    • Even though a newer thunderbird version would try to load/recover a profile of a older version, this is understood to be best effort basis.
    • There is a very small chance that a thunderbird version could clobber up a profile, and one opens such profiles in bated breath, keeping 7zipped compressed backups of course.
  • This use case of archiving/backup can't be that obscure
    • any user who has used thunderbird for long lengths of times, would have email folders needing archiving
    • archiving is not only for offloading to slower media, backup and reference, but keeps the active profile light, quick and responsive.
  • What is the recommended way to archive/backup mbox email folders?
    • is there a different tool/software to browser/view/search mbox email folders.

Ref:

What is the recommended way to archive/backup mbox email folders?

You likely should be looking for some commercial product.

  • You likely should be looking for some commercial product.

    • that apart.
  • I'm not saying this feature should be worked on pronto
  • the feature is necessary for anyone who uses a thunderbird like mail client for a long duration of time.
    • Thunderbird also seems like a way to download to local folders and archive webmail from gmail, live.com, exchange, davmail also.
  • It will be a plus point for thunderbird, if thunderbird mail had this feature because it implies a "will not clobber userdata" guarantee and guard against data loss.

Your interest is noted. However, it is highly unlikely to be provided by Thunderbird, given comment 2 (which I agree with). Doing this would also require code and by in from Firefox developers, which is even more unlikely to happen.

Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
  • just to clarify.
  • The data-modification prevention logic does not need to happen at the profile level which effects all mozilla projects that use the mozilla application framework. I understand the concern of overreaching into code that effects other projects like firefox.
  • It's okay for the profile as a whole to be opened as normal with the ability for the thunderbird process to do what it wants with the profile-files and profile-housekeeping-folders
  • The data-modification prevention logic only needs to be in the thunderbird application logic which disallows any write to the contents of the Mail folder inside the profile-folder, which corresponds to the local folder.
  • If a flag is toggled-on somehow, doesn't even need to be on the command line argument, maybe the read-only toggle can be done inside thunderbird's UI interface, just like how one toggles the offline/online modes.
    • Then all thunderbird UI elements that potentially do something inside the Mail folder, needs to check the flag, and be greyed-out/bail-out, thus preventing modification.
  • I read-only that there is a new message-database format in research/development, panorama [1]
    • replacing the current msf/mboxrd/mork
  • This has implications for archival profiles
    • it may mean that a user will also have to migrate all old-format profiles to the new one.
  • I hope the developers behind the project of the new database format will consider
    • standardizing the schema/format so that it doesn't change often.
    • a way to lock the database
    • and allow for programming interfaces that don't make it too difficult for features such as this.

Ref:

I agree being able to read mails read-only would be useful functionality. But that was not what you requested.
We have bug 37124 for that. With that, you could then on the OS side set files to read-only however you desire.

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