67095 - news biff should be off by default

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

we are pounding the news servers.

biff is on by default, but it needs to be off by default for news servers.

Comment 1

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

this is a pretty important thing.  marking 0.8 so it gets attention.

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

I think biff should be off for default on POP3 as well. We don't want to make a
connection when the user doesn't expect it for POP. For IMAP, I can see leaving
biff on by default.

Comment 3

[fenella]

Assign it to Sheelar

Comment 4

[fenella]

Assign it to Sheelar

Comment 5

[scottputterman]

I definitely agree that it should be off by default for news, but why wouldn't a
pop user want to know when they had mail? I don't have any data on this at all,
but I would think that most people would want to know whether or not they have
mail when they start up.  I could very well be wrong.  We received a lot of
complaints about biff not working. It could have been other bugs, but I think a
lot of this came from people who didn't know that it wasn't on and didn't know
how to turn it on.

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

We've never turned biff on by default for POP3 before 6.0, AFAIK. There are
probably less people with dial-up connections now, but, as I said before, if we
automatically biff, and the user is not dialed in, we will initiate a connection
through an auto-dialer. POP3 has more of an offline useage model. I don't feel
strongly about this, but that's the rationale. 

Comment 7

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

I'm pretty sure news biff is one of the reasons we are pounding so hard on
news.mozilla.org

I'm going to go fix this.

taking from racham, for now.

Comment 8

[racham]

Seth,

This probably is another case where we need to get the values on per protocol
type basis. Then, we can set the granularity as we want. 

Comment 9

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

accepting.

right, I'll be getting the default value from the protocol info.

Comment 10

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

fix coming in a few minutes.  news biff will be off, pop and imap are on (for
now.)  it will be a one line change to the protocol info implementations to
change that.

Comment 11

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

Attachment: fix, please review

Comment 12

[David :Bienvenu]

sr=bienvenu

Comment 13

[racham]

r=racham

Comment 14

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

fixed.  thanks.

Comment 15

[kmurray1115]

WRT to POP, it's probably a safer bet to do what we did in 4.x in this case. I'm
not crazy about the notion of initiating a dialer session everytime a POP
account gets biffed. Perhaps we need to evaluate a "don't automatically connect"
pref for POP accounts, in association with the "Log on to this account at
Startup" feature we just added. Has this been discussed before?

Comment 16

[scottputterman]

or maybe we should just make sure Logon to this account at startup defaults to
off for pop even if it is the default account.  My only concern (same with biff)
is that we got a lot of complaints about getting mail and biff not working.  It
seemed to me that these users didn't know how to turn everything on and that
turning it on by default would help solve this.  I don't want to annoy people
who have to dial up so if we decide that most users aren't going to be connected
when starting up a pop account, I'm fine with disabling everything.  I don't
know if we have any data to suggest that people just expect us to get their
mail.  That seemed to be a result of jglick's usability study but I might have
misinterpreted this.

Comment 17

[Sheela Ravindran]

verified


 Mac:  2001020208 Linux: 2001020210 win98:2001020208
 Biff off by default for news.

Comment 18

[R.K.Aa.]

biff on by default for POP is an annoyance. More often than not i'm offline when
i want to check up on some old mail, and i have to click OK on an error-message
about being unable to connect to server. Many complain about this, latest in bug
67888

Comment 19

[kmurray1115]

I concur - I'm not convinced the feedback we got from folks was POP specific either.

Comment 20

[scottputterman]

Well, I doubt it was imap specific!  I don't have any problem turning pop off by
default if that's what people want.

Comment 21

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

if you guys want biff off by default for pop, log a bug on me.