578503 - Mail Account Setup assumptions are damaging TB's reputation

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 531099

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Neville Hillyer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16
Build Identifier: TB 3.1


1 - Mail Account Setup always selects IMAP if both POP and IMAP are supported and, according to one report, even if they are not.

2 - The first Mail Account Setup window should allow an option of inputting generic server addresses such as mail.gandi.net rather than trying to determine it from the email address

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

1 - Quit TB
2 - Temporarily rename existing profile
3 - Launch TB
4 - Supply requested information
5 - Note that IMAP is always selected
6 - Note that, so far, there was no way to input generic server address eg mail.gandi.net
Actual Results:  

1 - IMAP always selected.

2 - Server address may not be in the form recommended.

Expected Results:  

It would reduce the large number of setup attempts if the first window had optional input fields for POP/IMAP and server address.


There are a large number of posts about the resulting difficulties of not having these fields.

In my opinion the addition of these fields (clearly marked optional) would improve user experience so much that it is well worth the slight extra complication. This would improve TB's reputation.

Comment 1

[Neville Hillyer]

Please see:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531099

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

how is this bug different from bug 531099 in what is needed to avoid the problem?

Comment 3

[Neville Hillyer]

It might be best to merge them but on a technical point surely one can have different bugs with a common solution.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(not a value judgment) in practice multiple bugs on the same issue tends to make bugzilla messy. :)   one makes an exception when the *solution* being sought is significantly different from or competes with the other bug(s).

hence my question of whether there was a technical basis which makes this bug different.

Comment 5

[Neville Hillyer]

It is now my view that keeping this as a separate bug would not serve any useful purpose. The original bug, which for some reason my search did not find, was about TB 3 and my bug relates to TB 3.1. As far as I can tell the symptoms are different but they could have several different common solutions.

I would not be unhappy if you marked this bug as a duplicate. I can always add extra comments to 531099.

I would, however, like 'enhancement' removed from 531099 as it is now clear that intending new users suffer a major loss of function and are put off trying TB for the first time. See posts to MozillaZine.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

yes, there is a certain amount of downside with the new interface.