381065 - Thunderbird calling home without the user's permission

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 369626

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Martin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.0 (20070326)

Thunderbird regularly tries to connect to IP 63.245.209.31 although all automatic updates are disabled.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Tools
2. Options
3. Advanced
4. Uncheck the checkboxes
Automatically check updates for
[ ] Thunderbird
[ ] Add-ons

(I have a localised version and translated the above back to English. So there might be some differences with the original.)

5. Use a firewall that shows a message if Thunderbird establishes an outgoing connection. Create an exception for your e-mail server, if you like.
Actual Results:  
Thunderbird regularly (especially at startup) tries to connect to IP 63.245.209.31

Expected Results:  
A programme should never trying to call home without my permission!

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

could it be the start page?

Comment 2

[Martin]

No, I disabled that as well. (Options > General).

Comment 3

[Adam Guthrie]

I think this is probably the extension manager updating its blocklist of extensions from addons.mozilla.org. Does this still happen if you set extensions.blocklist.enabled to false?

Comment 4

[Martin]

After creating the bugreport, I couldn't quite reproduce the behaviour. It may be that it is a one-time lookup that I allowed once and therefore doesn't occur any more. I think, it could well be the the extensions manager. The following can be reproduced: Installing an extension does trigger a lookup to dyna-addons.nslb.sj.mozilla.com, 63.245.209.31:443. If this is not successful, Thunderbird tries to repeat it after a while. 

(I don't particularly like that. Wikipedia states: "Spyware is computer software that collects personal information about users without their informed consent." And I deem it personal information, what e-mail client I use, when I install extensions and which ones I use.)

Comment 5

[Martin]

Yes, indeed. Setting extensions.blocklist.enabled to false prevents Thunderbird from connecting daily (or so) to 63.245.209.31:443.