538115 - email account auto-configuration : add POP3 / IMAP choice

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, enhancement)

Description

[Pierre-Aurélien Georges]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; fr; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Thunderbird/3.0

This is a suggestion : on the new email account auto-configuration dialog box, it would be a good idea to have 2 radio buttons to let the user choose between POP3 and IMAP when both protocols are available on his or her email server.
Topping on the cake : an "help" button or a small section on this dialog box that explains main differences between POP3 and IMAP (in a word : IMAP is "synchronized every where", but not always available on all servers, whereas POP3 is "download a copy on my local computer", but universally available on most servers)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Tools menu -> Account settings
2. Accounts management drop down menu => Add a new email account
3. Fill in name, email address, and password of your email server
(sorry if menu names are not exact, this is translation from French version of Thunderbird)
Actual Results:  
Thunderbird automatically chose "IMAP" settings for me, and if I want to use POP3 instead, I need to click on Modify and enter all settings manually... This is not appropriate for persons with very few computer skills.

Expected Results:  
When both IMAP and POP3 are available on a server, Thunderbird should display 2 radio buttons to let the user easily chose between POP3 and IMAP (and optionally display some help about the main differences between these two protocols)
When only either IMAP or POP3 is available, these radio buttons need not to be displayed in order to simplify user interface and not bothering user with unavailable sophisticated options.

When using the "modify" button to customize connection parameters,
a drop list is displayed, letting me choose between "IMAP" and "POP" but when I switch between both,
incoming server URL and connection port are not updated to match the new selected protocol.
Also when I change between SSL/TLS - STARTTLS - none, the port is not updated to match the new selected security parameter.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

I think the person with little computer skill will be better of with imap than pop. This is why when the choice is available Autoconfiguration picks up imap over pop. 


>Also when I change between SSL/TLS - STARTTLS - none, the port is not updated
>to match the new selected security parameter.

This is another bug that we have on file.