640938 - Forgets passwords when 4 or more mail accounts are held within a single profile

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Lynda Stratford]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Firefox/3.6.15
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.9

We have a small number of users with four or more email accounts held within a single profile.  All but one of their passwords is saved using Password Manager, however, on a regular basis Thunderbird forgets the saved passwords.  It usually happens when Thunderbird is first started, but can happen at any time, and is, therefore, not apparently linked to the actions of the user or another application.  A larger number of users have three or fewer email accounts held within a single profile and rarely suffer from the same problem.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create four or more email accounts within the same profile, saving passwords of all but one using Password Manager
2.Use account as normal
3.Exit from program
4.Restart program (possibly following day)
Actual Results:  
Password request dialogue boxes appear for each account

Expected Results:  
Password request dialogue box appears for primary account

Default theme used.
Action occurs on Thunderbird 3.1.9 (and previous version) on Windows XP and Windows 7.
Profiles held on mapped network drive for all users.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Do you backup your profiles regularly ?

Comment 2

[Lynda Stratford]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Do you backup your profiles regularly ?

Yes, nightly.

Comment 3

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > Do you backup your profiles regularly ?
> 
> Yes, nightly.

Can you check the rights for the files in the user Profiles ( it's in %APPDATA%\Thunderbird ) of the sec*.* and si*.* files ? Are the archive bit's set ? Are these files writable, readable by the user who will launch the process ?

Comment 4

[Lynda Stratford]

(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > (In reply to comment #1)
> > > Do you backup your profiles regularly ?
> > 
> > Yes, nightly.
> 
> Can you check the rights for the files in the user Profiles ( it's in
> %APPDATA%\Thunderbird ) of the sec*.* and si*.* files ? Are the archive bit's
> set ? Are these files writable, readable by the user who will launch the
> process ?

Yes, the archive bits are set and the users have read and write access

Comment 5

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Does removing the archive helps ?

Comment 6

[Lynda Stratford]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Does removing the archive helps ?

I'll remove it on one of the affected machines and see what happens

Comment 7

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Does removing the archive helps ?

I meant archive bits.... I really need to read myself before pressing the save changes button.

Comment 8

[Lynda Stratford]

(In reply to comment #7)
> (In reply to comment #5)
> > Does removing the archive helps ?
> 
> I meant archive bits.... I really need to read myself before pressing the save
> changes button.

Sadly, this doesn't seem to have helped.  As the problem doesn't reproduce on a regular basis this took a while to ascertain, but it has forgotten the passwords twice since removing the archive attribute.

Comment 9

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Are you Thunderbirds deployed with extensions ?

Comment 10

[Lynda Stratford]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Are you Thunderbirds deployed with extensions ?

Yes, all have Lightning.  The office most affected also uses Mail Tweak.

Comment 11

[Lynda Stratford]

(In reply to comment #10)
> (In reply to comment #9)
> > Are you Thunderbirds deployed with extensions ?
> 
> Yes, all have Lightning.  The office most affected also uses Mail Tweak.

It's gone a bit quiet - any more thoughts, please?

Comment 12

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Could you try removing all extensions? I doubt this is an extension issue, but lets see if there are some sideeffects.

Comment 13

[Lynda Stratford]

Thanks for this, however, the extensions that we use with Thunderbird all directly relate to the work we need to do, i.e. Lightning (to give us the calendar facility), Provider for Google Calendar (not used by everyone, but still required by some), British English Dictionary and Mail Tweak (to allow mail merging).  I could temporarily remove Mail Tweak, but the others would need to remain, and so as I can't remove all of the extensions, I don't know if there would be any point.  Do you have any other suggestions, please?

Comment 14

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Maybe you could test this on a separate profile. This way you still have your previous setup but can use the clean profile for testing. To change profiles, start the application with the -P flag.

Comment 15

[Lynda Stratford]

OK, I can try that, but I cannot remove all extensions because I need the Lightning one to provide the calendaring service and the Google Provider (assuming it's still necessary) in order to link to the Google calendar that we use.  Given this, do you still recommend trying the experiment with only the non-calendaring extensions removed?

Comment 16

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Extensions are usually per profile. I would suggest not to install any extensions in the new testing profile.

Comment 17

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Lynda, did you have good results?

Comment 18

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to last question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.