556607 - offline.autoDetect doesn't seem to work. Stuck in online mode.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[pd9]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 3.0.4

Thunderbird won't automatically detect offline status. It starts in online mode whether I'm online or not and stays that way unless I change it manually. offline.autoDetect is set to True.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Thunderbird offline.
2. Go online.
3. Go offline again.
Actual Results:  
Always remains online.

Expected Results:  
When I start Thunderbird offline it should be in offline mode. When I go online it should detect it and automatically switch to online. When I go offline again it should automatically switch back to offline.

There are two systems in our household, one with Vista and one with XP. Mine is Vista and acts as described above. The XP system also has trouble with the same issue though not as severely. If the system is offline Thunderbird will start offline, but it's still unpredictable and doesn't always switch back and forth as it should.

Comment 1

[cantalou]

I'm confused by "start Thunderbird offline"
Do you mean that Thunderbird status: File => Offline => Work Offline is Offline or do you mean that your computer has no access to internet?
Can you make difference between Thunderbird status and PC connection.

Do you want:
- TB to start in Offline status regardless your computer has access or not to Internet but based TB status during last time you used it
- TB to switch to Offline status when computer get disconnnected
- TB to switch to Online status when computer get connected
I don't know to what extend this behaviour is "by design" or not

Can you check that in SafeMode, TB behaves the same.
http://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

If problem is not coming back in Safe Mode, please give us a list of your
extensions.
Nightly Tester Tools extension may help you.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/6543
Tools => Nightly Tester Tools => Copy List of Extensions to Clipboard

If problem is coming back in Safe Mode, could you please check your error
console (Tools => Error Console) and copy & paste any message in this bug.

Comment 2

[pd9]

Hi, thanks for your feedback.

What I'd like Thunderbird to do is recognize on the fly whether or not I'm connected to the internet and adjust itself accordingly by either going into online or offline mode automatically. Ideally, if I start up connected to the internet then TB would recognize that and open in "online" mode and if I start up disconnected from the internet then TB would automatically detect this and open in "offline" mode. And if I have TB open and I get disconnected from the internet then it would automatically switch to "offline" mode and when I reconnect then it would go back into "online" mode. I thought that's what the offline.autoDetect was supposed to do but maybe not.

I have a dial-up connection so I wasn't able to do much testing that way. TB did open in "offline" mode but I wasn't able to connect or test anything else.

Themes and extensions:

Walnut for Thunderbird 1.8.56
CompactHeader 1.1.8
Extra Folder Columns 0.4
Mail Tweak 1.0 pre7
Manually Sort Folders 0.5

I don't know if it matters, but I've tested with all the add-ons disabled and TB still doesn't automatically recognize my internet connection status.

Comment 3

[pd9]

"I have a dial-up connection so I wasn't able to do much testing that way. TB
did open in "offline" mode but I wasn't able to connect or test anything else."

I mean in Safe Mode. When I was in Safe Mode it wouldn't let me dial up.

Comment 4

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> "I have a dial-up connection so I wasn't able to do much testing that way. TB
> did open in "offline" mode but I wasn't able to connect or test anything else."
> 
> I mean in Safe Mode. When I was in Safe Mode it wouldn't let me dial up.

Safe-mode is not the windows safe-mode but the thunderbird safe-mode :-) This should not change your ability to dial-up or not.

Comment 5

[pd9]

Oh, okay. It does the same thing in safe mode. 

Shifting gears just a little, if I set the preference to "Remember previous online state" it does remember. But if the previous state was "offline" then it won't automatically switch to online when I connect to the internet and vice versa for "online." The "Ask me" preference also works okay, that is when I open TB it asks what mode I want to start in, but it doesn't automatically switch between modes.

Maybe I'm looking for something that was never intended to be there in the first place, but a feature like this would be good I think. For me it's not a problem really, but for someone like my mom something to make the online/offline function work automatically and more consistently would help out a lot. She knows next to nothing about computers but uses email a lot. The whole concept of online and offline freaks her out completely. Clearly it would be in her own best interest to learn about it if she's going to be using email regularly but at her age forget about it. :-)

Even something like the boolean preference network.manage-offline-status that Firefox now has would probably simplify thing a lot.

Comment 6

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Silly question how do you access the internet ?

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

pd9, reporter, seems to be totally gone
i wonder how pd9's firefox behaves?