408515 - /var/spool/mail: Mozilla does not play well with others

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 65720

(MailNews Core :: Movemail, defect)

Description

[Mark Whitis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070310 Iceweasel/2.0.0.3 (Debian-2.0.0.3-1)
Build Identifier: 

For decades, you could use different email programs on the same set of mailboxes.    /bin/mail, /usr/usb/mail, pine, elm, mush, imapd, etc.   

Leave it to gui programs like thunderbird and evolution to screw that up.
I can't believe this is still broken.

Inbox is /var/spool/mail/myname (or wherever else I have configured it).   You don't get to move those messages somewhere else except when explictly told to interactively or by mail filters.    You MUST NOT import them into your private mailboxes where other clients can not find them.  /var/spool/mail/myname is not a POP3 account, stop treating it like one.   If you need to create an index file, you can but it will need to be in ~/mail since you don't have write permissions there.   And you have to rebuild it if any other programs have modified the files.

Mailboxes are in ~/mail or wherever else the user decides to put them.

You cannot expect the user to change the configuration of pine, 
procmail/mailfilter/etc. to use your program.   You cannot expect
the user to switch to thunderbird without testing it first either (so far
it has ALWAYS flunked for the reasons spelled out in this bug report).
And even if the user decides to use thunderbird as their main client, they may still use, for example, pine when coming in by SSH.

Mail is delivered by calling sendmail, if I so choose.   I happen to be letting pine talk directly to the smtp folder at the moment.   But sendmail can have advantages, too.

Lots of other people have the same complaint.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Start thunderbird for the first time.   First dialog box is wrong.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away, back Aug 4)]

Did you set it up as a movemail account, then? 

Comment 2

[Mark Whitis]

                                                                                         
Yes, I tried it as a movemail account.   The result was completely unacceptable. and unusable.  thunderbird removed all the messages from the spool directory and moved them all to its proprietary mail store.

Thunderbird would not use my old mbox format mail folders in ~/mail even after I changed the directory on local files to point there.   You should be able to use them by simply rebuilding your index files whenever they are missing or older than the mbox files.   And DON'T put the index files in my ~/mail directory - they only make a mess when you use other software (pine, fgrep, imapd, etc).  I have 154 folders there (not counting subdirectories).   ~/var/thunderbird/ is fine.    

I also tried IMAP and IIRC, thunderbird also handled it incorrectly.   It sucked it dry.   IMAP and /var/spool/mail/myname are not to be treated like POP3.  They are real mailboxes.    Messages are to be handled individually.    Treating them like a POP3 account is 100% wrong.   POP is a defective by design protocol, that is why IMAP is invented.   POP provides essentially a FIFO queue.   IMAP (or /var/spool/mail/) provides a mailbox.   I have 5GB of email in 154 folders (plus some subdirectories containing mail from past eras).    These are not to be imported into thunderbird, they are to be used where they are.    The inbox is to be used where it is.   

When used with IMAP, thunderbird failed to display message folders other
than the inbox.

I do not require thunderbird to run spamassassin on my messages.   That is done during delivery by mailfilter (similar to procmail).   If the user asks for spam filtering or message filtering/sorting, it is to be done like this:
  - check each new message in the mailbox
  - if the filter says to move it some place else, then move it.   Otherwise,
    _leave it where it is_.
  - It is best if you have your own mechanism for identifying "new" 
    (unfiltered) messages.   That way, if someone moves a message from
    ~/mail/spam back to ~/Inbox, it stays there.   Or any other message
    that was sorted improperly.   Your message index files could be used, or
    a list of message ids.   You can also add a header field (including a 
    random key unique to each system so spammers can't forge it), that
    says a message has been filtered once each time you filter a message.
  - use standard mailbox locking mechanisms.
  - Recognize that while only one program can have write access to a mailbox
    at any given time, multiple programs can read it simultaneously and
    multiple programs may write to the mailbox at different times.
  - inbox is to be treated more like any other mailbox.   You can run
    filters (spam or sorting), in place, if the user has asked you to.   You may 
    notify when new mail arrives.  And if you have a POP3 account, then you
    can create your own local mailbox and copy messages into it as if they
    were delivered by an external mail delivery program.
   
As it is, thunderbird is 100% unusable for anyone who uses a traditional mail store.   It is also unusable to people who are considering switching to thunderbird permanently because they can't try it before they switch.
Go read the mahogany page http://mahogany.sourceforge.net/.   This program was written because of design flaws in programs like thunderbird. Unfortunately, mahogany will not compile or I would probably be using it.

Incoming mail flow on my system, currently:
   - fetchmail - transmits them to sendmail SMTP daemon
   - sendmail SMTP daemon, routes them and calls the local delivery agent,
     which in this case happens to be invoked by .forward but can also be
     set up to handle .forward.
   - mailfilter is the delivery agent.
   - mailfilter filters through spamassassin, among others.
All of this is pretty generic.   At any time, I can eliminate the use of POP3 and have incoming messages go directly to my SMTP daemon.

It is good that you can pop messages directly so users don't have to set all that up but thunderbird should work properly on a well managed system where that stuff is already set up.

Comment 3

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Thunderbird would not use my old mbox format mail folders in ~/mail
> even after I changed the directory on local files to point there.

Did you restart Tb after setting change? See Bug 2654 and Bug 224831.

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Sounds like bug 65720 to me.