254502 - change of username causes the problem that the old username is "remembered"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 254500

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Wolfgang Sailer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird version 0.7.1 (20040626)

Dear All!

Something I wanted to report for a long time, as it happened in Mozilla Mail 1.2
a long time ago, and now once again in TB 0.7.2:

To distinguish an account on the mail server I will call it "server account" vs.
an account created in TB which I will call "TB account".

I was assigned a new UID from my ISP, the Uni Innsbruck. To move mail data from
my old server account (called "UID_old" from now on) to my new server account
(called "UID_new"), both my old and my new server accounts worked for 1 week
simultaneously. Both server accounts are on the same IMAP mail server. Here is
what I did and what reproducibly causes a BUG:

In order not to have to configure my TB account "from scratch" I changed the TB
"user name" form UID_old to UID_new in "Tools ==> Account Settings ==> Account
Settings ==> Server Settings ==> User Name" where I exchanged UID_old with
UID_new. Everything else was left unchanged (server, parameters, etc...)
That worked fine, next time launching TB I was queried for the password of the
UID_new server account and I read the INBOX of the new server account from the
mail server - all fine.

Now, just to transfer the old mails form the old server account to the new one I
created a new IMAP TB account with UID_old as "User Name" under "Tools ==>
Account Settings ==> Add account..." with minimal configuration (like entering
"x" for name, and "x@y" for email address etc...) and in the end of the creation
dialog it did not let me create the account because TB said: "there exists
already an account with the same user name and server. Specify other login data"
(or something like this). So thunderbird seems to have "remembered" that the old
TB account once had the UID_old associated with it and did dot realize that by
then it used the UID_new instead.

I.e. TB did not let me create an e-mail TB account with the username UID_old
because it did not "understand" that the old TB account's user name was changed
to UID_new.

The only way I could copy the mails form the old to the new server account was
then to add a POP3 TB account with the UID_old and copy the mails to the TB
local folders, then copy them form the local folders to the new server account
(IMAP).

I fell into this pitfall for the second time now. Looking onto this from the
past, you might assume, I should have learned from the first time, but after
all, humans are perhaps not capable of learning in the end...

As this bug exists since Mozilla 1.2 at least, I assume it has not been noticed
before.

Greetinx,
Wolfgang

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. change user name of an existing mail account in the TB account manager
2. try to add a new account (probably on the same server) with the old user name

Actual Results:  
in the end of the creation dialog of the new account TB refuses to create the
account saying such an account already existed.

Expected Results:  
check that the old user name is no longer in use by the old account and permit
me to create a new account with the identical data that USED to be in use by the
first account but is no longer.

Comment 1

[Stephen Walker]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 254500 ***