845330 - gets mail via pop3 only if I specify the account via drop down

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(MailNews Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[rm.pauli]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.57 Safari/537.17

Steps to reproduce:

I pressed the button to download the mail from the pop3 server.


Actual results:

TB did something (log somewhere?), but did not get the mail I checked to be waiting at the provider.


Expected results:

The same thing that happens when I get the mail via the drop down right next to the get-from-all button. In this case it indeed got the mail. This is completely unlogically to me and should also be to you. Come on, ALL none, One done.

Comment 1

[rm.pauli]

I'm dealing with alias.
If I delete the pop3 password for the account
and ask to download mail for that account
I'm asked to enter a password, which I do.
If I then look at the password list,
the user name (email address) is that of the alias,
not the email address of the account.
Nowhere in the account besides new identities
do I mention this alias.
So let's delete it, delete the password as well,
trigger download... ****, it did download?
Ok, I'll close TB, open it again, 
trigger download again, 
and now I'm prompted for the password
(complete nonsense and another bug),
give it the password, look at the password list,
and, BINGO, the alias was taken as user name.
No idea where it took it from.

Comment 2

[rm.pauli]

I should mention that the account originally
was named with the email address of the alias.
Why? Because I wanted it to be the default
sender when writting an email.
After problems I renamed it with the original
account email address.

Comment 3

[:aceman]

You can use aliases in TB, they are called identities and can be set in the account settings-> account -> manage identities.

Can you please explain the original report better? You did click Get messages but did not get any? Did you expect it do download email from all your accounts? Do you have more than one defined in TB? I do not quite understand the problem.

Comment 4

[rm.pauli]

I do have three accounts.
Let's call them A, B, C.
TB created them when importing OL.
Account A has alias defined at the provider.
OL had them as dummy accounts.
I deleted them in TB and instead added 
them as you decribed it to account A in TB.
As far as I remember it worked.
But now I wanted one of the alias to
be the standard for answering emails.
I changed the user name of account A 
from main email address to alias.
OC, this wasn't the only change.
But I can't recall all I tried.
Anyway.
Yes, if I press get all messages 
I expect that to happen.
But only B and C delivered.
Only after explicitly asking 
to get messages from A A delivered.

Comment 5

[:aceman]

You can change which identity (alias) is the main one (default) in the manage identities dialog so that replies will be sent from it. Yeah, only starting at TB 18 (bug 314806)...

Ok, so you press Get Mail button, and you only get one account checked?

Or you use the dropdown on that button and choose Get All New messages and it still does not download all?

Comment 6

[rm.pauli]

I got B and C after pressing 
the get mail button.
That's mail from two accounts.
But none from account A,
the one I fiddled with.
However, using the drop down,
and choosing A, I got from A.
I don't think I ever tried 
get all from the drop down.
Seems redundant to me.

Currently I'm not capable to reproduce,
because I deleted A and set it up again
via the wizard (I'm guessing the english terms 
because TB here is in German - any toggle?).
I struggled to find the button to direct 
the mails to the same local folders as before.
Account A now uses the main email address.
The alias is set up as dummy account that 
does not get mail but is standard.
Seems to work (v18 already up?).
It's odd, however, that the dummy account
shows up in the get message drop down.
In account/server/extended it's set to
be NOT included when reading messages.

Comment 7

[:aceman]

(In reply to rm.pauli from comment #6)
> I got B and C after pressing 
> the get mail button.
> That's mail from two accounts.
> But none from account A,
> the one I fiddled with.
> However, using the drop down,
> and choosing A, I got from A.
> I don't think I ever tried 
> get all from the drop down.
> Seems redundant to me.
If you want the "get mail" button to actually get messages from all accounts, that is bug 281417.
Currently it should only get mail from the account which you have selected in the left folder pane. I find it strange it would get from both B and C.

> Currently I'm not capable to reproduce,
> because I deleted A and set it up again
> via the wizard (I'm guessing the english terms 
> because TB here is in German - any toggle?).
> I struggled to find the button to direct 
> the mails to the same local folders as before.
If you want to store all mail from several accounts into one, that can be set up in account settings -> server settings -> advanced. From your further text, it seems you have set up the dummy account this way.

> Account A now uses the main email address.
> The alias is set up as dummy account that 
> does not get mail but is standard.
> Seems to work (v18 already up?).
V18 is released as beta, you can get it at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/channel/ . There will never be a stable release of v18. Only TB 24 will get a stable release once the cycle comes. (The developement has not slowed down, only there are less frequent public releases as many people got annoyed by that in an email client).

> It's odd, however, that the dummy account
> shows up in the get message drop down.
> In account/server/extended it's set to
> be NOT included when reading messages.
Then it is excluded only when you click "get all new messages". If you select it specifically in the list, it will still be downloaded.

Comment 8

[rm.pauli]

Had to pull the mail out of the junk bin... :-)
Thanks for your comments.
They all make sense, except the one below.

> If you want the "get mail" button to actually get messages from all accounts, 
> that is bug 281417.
> Currently it should only get mail from the account which you have selected 
> in the left folder pane. I find it strange it would get from both B and C.

I don't select one on the left. There is and was only one: the local folder. All accounts are configured to feed its in-box. That's how it was set up when outlook was imported and I had the problem. Later I set it up myself and redirected the accounts again to the local folder (settings -> server settings -> advanced, exactly, but hard to find).

Comment 9

[:aceman]

So In account settings -> account A -> server settings -> advanced you have "include this server when getting new mail" unchecked. And it really does not download when you just get new mail for Local folders into which accounts A, B, C are deferred.

So what exactly is wrong with that?

Comment 10

[rm.pauli]

I don't know what was set when outlook was imported, especially not if or not "include this..." was checked or not. At that time I had no idea. At that time each account was set up as one by itself. No alias was used since OL had none. Nevertheless, only the local folder was in the left pane, even after I fiddled around with the alias and the POP user name. I wasn't yet (in) advanced. It's very likely that they all were included in getting mail by default, not? So why should one be excluded if I press the get-messages button? If changing the user name was the cause, why did it work when I asked for mail via the drop down?

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

import issue?

Comment 12

[:aceman]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #11)

import issue?

I don't think so. The claim is that the account A stopped fetching when the username was changed. I can try to reproduce that. Or you could, if you have the time.

Somehow I expect the "Get mail" button only gets messages for accounts that are "authenticated", i.e. we have credentials for them stored in the password manager so that the connections can automatically be carried out. We do not ask the user for passwords to servers that do not have yet password stored.
If clicking "get mail for account A" works without asking for password, that would mean the password is stored for that server.
My feeling is that the determination of which accounts are "authenticated" may have some bug so that it does not think account A has a password stored, but when we force the account specifically, it finds the password.
It is easy to make such a bug in our code, due to bug 302388, where the passwords are stored under the first username of the account in the password manager, not the current one. It seems the reporter noticed something like that in comment 1.