569250 - mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed keeps reverting to false

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 674013

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[andy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100526 Thunderbird/3.1

For several years (maybe even 5) I have had a continual problem where the mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed setting somehow gets changed to false. It may go 1 year, it may go 3 months, but the setting keeps automatically changing to false, rather than the value of true which I prefer. I have been using the same profile the entire time. I have had this same problem across several versions of thunderbird and have had the problem on both windows 2000 and mac os x.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. change the mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed setting to true
2. wait 3 months to a year
3. the value will randomly change to false


Expected Results:  
the setting should always remain true

i don't know how to reproduce this problem and I am having trouble developing a diagnostic plan.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

How about trying to figure out if one extension changes this behaviour ? (say run with 0 extensions, then one, etc ...)

Comment 2

[andy]

The only extensions I am running are Enigmail and Nightly Tester Tools. I don't really see why these extensions would be related.

The problem just happened again the other day.

Do you have any more specific troubleshooting suggestions?

Comment 3

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #2)
> The only extensions I am running are Enigmail and Nightly Tester Tools.
> I don't really see why these extensions would be related.

I can't understand why you can say Enigmail is absolutely irrelevant even though format=flowed is relevant to problem.

Following is a part of RFC for format=flowed with delsp=yes.
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.6
> 4.6. Digital Signatures and Encryption
>(snip)
>  Therefore, the use of [OpenPGP] with format=flowed messages is
>  strongly discouraged. [OpenPGP-MIME] is recommended instead.
Enigmail home.
> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php

As digital sign is also supported by Enigmail(==interface for OpenPGP), disabling of format=flowed internally is probably required.

No error or warning in Error Console while you are using Tb with Enigmail?
Keep backup of prefs.js multiple timess while you are using Tb, with caring for interfere of Tb's writing to prefs.js. If setting change of mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed is seen in a backup of prefs.js, it's perhaps by Enigmail.

Comment 4

[Ale]

I guess that it is indeed related to Enigmail. With Thunderbird 3, each time Thunderbird is updated, the setting reverts to false (this only with Enigmail installed). Now with Thunderbird 5 and Enigmail 1.2 it looks like it disables it at each start of Thunderbird... so you probably have to complain with Enigmail developers about this.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Ale from comment #4)
> I guess that it is indeed related to Enigmail. With Thunderbird 3, each time
> Thunderbird is updated, the setting reverts to false (this only with
> Enigmail installed). 

then invalid

Comment 6

[Patrick Brunschwig]

I disagree with the invalid status; it's a result of bug 672537.

Comment 7

[andy]

as the original poster of this bug, I can confirm the default value is changed when enigmail is activated. if I set the value to true, disable enigmail, and then reenable enigmail, it reverts to false in thunderbird 3.1.9 on linux. i really thought that this started happening before i ever used enigmail, but that has been so many years ago, it is hard to tell at this point. i can believe that the seemingly random occurrence I encountered  may have been triggered by an update to thunderbird, however, I don't have any updates to do now to test.

I can also confirm the behavior using thunderbird 5 on mac os occurs every time you launch thunderbird.

I agree that enigmail may be causing this, but as in bug 672537, I don't think the extensions should have an authority to override the user.js preferences. i do think the extensions should be able to override a default, but I don't think they should be able to automatically erase a manually set value to their default. there could be a higher level design philosophy that disagrees with my opinion though.