455936 - Thunderbird shouldn't check for email if no network connection present

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Colin Stark]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 2.0.0.16

I have Thunderbird set to load automatically when my computer boots.  This gets annoying when there is no network connection because i have 6 or 7 alerts that pop up saying "Can't connect to server mail.server.com" (one for each account that I have set up).
What would be ideal is something that detects if there is a network connection and only tries to connect when one is present.  Something similar to what Pidgin does would be ideal: If there's no network connection, instead of trying to connect, it simply says "Waiting for network connection" along the bottom of the window.  When a network connection becomes present, it connects automatically.
This occurs on Windows, Mac and Linux (have used all 3).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Disable network connection
2. Open Thunderbird

Actual Results:  
Lots of alerts that pop up telling me that the server can't be found

Expected Results:  
No alerts that pop up.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

This got implemented for Firefox (linux) but it's removed again because there is no reliable way on linux for Online/offline.
There is bug 359134 which suggests that this should work on windows ?

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

It should, if you set network.autodial-helper.enabled to false.

Matti: do you know the bug that got removed in?

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

bug 424626

Comment 4

[Colin Stark]

I didn't see that option in the Thunderbird about:config window.
I see another option called offline.autoDetect.  Would this possibly enable the functionality that I'm looking for?  I've enabled it and I'll write back if this accomplishes what I'm hoping it does.

Comment 5

[Colin Stark]

Update: This didn't change anything.
Any other settings that might?

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Did you try creating the (boolean) pref network.autodial-helper.enabled ? You just right click in the Config Editor.

Comment 7

[Colin Stark]

I created that boolean value and tried setting it to both true and false and there was no effect on the alerts.  Any other things I could test out?