658184 - New account setup for other account types talks about Mail accounts and doesn't mention RSS

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Eric Moore]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:5.0) Gecko/20110518 Thunderbird/3.3a4pre ID:20110518000038

I'm running Litmus test 1 (create rss account) in the "rss account & subscriptions" tests using Thunderbird/3.3a4pre ID:20110518000038 under Vista. 

"Add other accounts" brings up a new account wizard that has radio buttons for "blogs & news feeds" and "newsgroup account". However, the two paragraphs above it only talk about needing to setup a mail or newsgroup account in order to receive messages. The text states the wizard will collect the information necessary to setup a Mail account even though there is no radio button for that account type, and you should use "Add Mail account" (not "Add other accounts" ) to create one. 

The two paragraphs never talk about a "blogs & news feeds" account (even though that radio button was selected by default). They also don't give any hint that RSS is used for "blogs & news feeds" . Instead they say to contact your system administrator or ISP if you don't have the requested information. That is reasonable advice for a mail or newsgroup account, but not appropriate for a "blogs & news feeds" account. It should deal with the use case of somebody stumbling across a blog while browsing and deciding to use RSS to read it from then on. 

The text needs rewriting. It would help when its rewrote if it considered the possibility of somebody also using an add-on that supported a different account type. I assume the add-on would add another choice to the "account actions" list box. 



Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Andreas can you fix this ?

Comment 2

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

English is only my second language, but I'll give it a shot and then people can point out the grammar errors ;)

Comment 3

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Just to make sure I'm not missing anything. Does anyone know what kind of account a Unix Mailspool count as (I want to consider the text to address that tool)?
Is it a kind of special e-mail address, or something a bit different?
(I didn't get a lot smarter from reading the Wikipedia article)

Comment 4

[Eric Moore]

See http://www-archive.mozilla.org/mailnews/movemail/index.html

Its called a Movemail account. The mail server type is set to "movemail". There is nothing special about its email address. My impression is that a MoveMail account doesn't check for new messages on startup or every X minutes, but does check for new mail when you press the GetMail button. 

It would be great if you add support for it in the account wizard. I periodically get questions from Linux users in the MozillaZine forums on how to configure an account to use a mail spool.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Help_Documentation:Creating_an_Account documents how MoveMail used to be an option in the old account wizard.

I suggest you also read:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-thunderbird/+question/26990 (2008-03-13)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1718795 (March 31st, 2011)

Comment 5

[:aceman]

Andreasn?

Comment 6

[:aceman]

(In reply to Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn) from comment #3)
> Just to make sure I'm not missing anything. Does anyone know what kind of
> account a Unix Mailspool count as (I want to consider the text to address
> that tool)?
> Is it a kind of special e-mail address, or something a bit different?
> (I didn't get a lot smarter from reading the Wikipedia article)

Unix mailspool account reads new messages from the local /var/spool/<username> file instead of e.g. POP3 server. That file is already in a mbox format. The mail got there via some system mail daemons that downloaded it from a server or actually the daemon can act as a mail server or mail transfer agent so that messages were delivered directly to it.

Comment 7

[:aceman]

This seems to be partly fixed by bug 566142 by removing references to Mail and News and leaving the text account type neutral. Is that enough for this bug or do you need something better?

Comment 8

[Eric Moore]

The text in the 21.0 beta doesn't have the confusing text about needing to setup a mail or newsgroup account. Great. However, it still doesn't mention RSS. Some blogs are just HTML web pages with no way to subscribe to a web feed. News Feed is ambiguous. Does it support both RSS and Atom? 

It would help if some sort of hint was given what "Blogs and News Feeds" really means so that when somebody is staring at either "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" or the orange/white "Common web feed icon" they can figure out that its something they can subscribe to with that type of account. 

Perhaps you could change that string to something like "Blogs and News Feeds (RSS/Atom)" followed by the orange/white "Common web feed icon"? 

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/feed-icon-guidelines/

Comment 9

[:aceman]

OK, what does bwinton think? :)

Comment 10

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

bwinton thinks that most people don't understand or care about the difference between RSS and Atom, and highlighting them would confuse more people than it would help, so I'm not a fan of "Blogs and News Feeds (RSS/Atom)".

But, having said that, I probably wouldn't be opposed to adding the feed icon.  (Perhaps this version of it: http://instagram.com/p/TyZjIDCR6Y/# ? ;)  Does someone want to mock it up, and we can bikeshed on it from there?

Thanks,
Blake.

Comment 11

[:aceman]

What about adding at least "RSS" ?

Comment 12

[alta88]

Feeds are no longer part of Other Accounts, so this is no longer relevant.