862221 - [autoconfig] Mail account setup wizard so oversimplifies errors it's useless

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Jerry Zdenek]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20130328110703

Steps to reproduce:

I tried to set up a new computer using existing mail accounts that are not in the mozilla database on 17.0.5esr


Actual results:

It reports" Thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account"


Expected results:

Any sort of useful error message is required.  There is insufficient information in that error message to locate and fix the problem. There's at least a dozen things that could be wrong, and there's no way to tell which way to head to fix it.  This is no better than a bug report of "It's broke."  The accounts I have work fine on other computers using thunderbird.  I've got a setting wrong somewhere, and something useful needs to be reported.   It's just as useful as popping up a box that says "No".

Comment 1

[James Rome]

I agree with the above. For example, in TB22.0 (beta), the gmail account settings have changed. In the release TB, the account name is [e-mail]
when you enter this, the wizard is trying [e-mail]@imap.gmail.com, but not telling you. And there is no way to get out of this wizard if it fails.

It needs to say what it is trying!

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

While setting up my gmail.com account from scratch works for me without a problem, I've tried an invalid address and password and get the catch-all message and ending up in the manual setup mode. There is nothing in the Activity Manager or in the Error Console which would provide a hint what went wrong or which settings were already tried by the auto-config wizard.

Thus, being more verbose when running the wizard would certainly help the troubleshooting process, also when assisting others.

> And there is no way to get out of this wizard if it fails.

If it fails you should end up in the manual setup mode. However, you can't set up a configuration which doesn't check out as valid.

Comment 3

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

The account setup was completely rebuilt so this is most likely invalid as we have proper notifications and suggested next steps when something fails.