Wed Mar 18 03:35:39 CET 2015
Upgrading ThunderBird
With the recent update from the LongTimeSuffering / ExtendedSufferingRelease of
Thunderbird from 24 to 31 we encountered some serious badness.
The best description of the symptoms would be "IMAP doesn't work at all"
On some machines the existing accounts would be disappeared, on others they would just be inert and never receive updates.
After some digging I was finally able to find the cause of this:
Too old config file.
Uhm ... what? Well - some of these accounts have been around since TB2. Some newer ones were enhanced by copying the prefs.js from existing accounts. And so there's a weird TB bugreport that is mostly triggered by some bits being rewritten around Firefox 30, and the config parser screwing up with translating 'old' into 'new', and ... effectively ... IMAP being not-whitelisted, thus by default blacklisted, and hilarity happens.
Should you encounter this bug you "just" need to revert to a prefs.js from before the update (sigh) and then remove all lines involving "capability.policy".
Then update and ... things work. Whew.
Why not just remove profile and start with a clean one you say? Well ... for one TB gets brutally unusably slow if you have emails. So just re-reading the mailbox content from a local fast IMAP server will take ~8h and TB will not respond to user input during that time.
And then you manually have to go into eeeevery single subfolder so that TB remembers it is there and actually updates it. That's about one work-day per user lost to idiocy, so sed'ing the config file into compliance is the easy way out.
Thank you, Mozilla, for keeping our lives exciting!
The best description of the symptoms would be "IMAP doesn't work at all"
On some machines the existing accounts would be disappeared, on others they would just be inert and never receive updates.
After some digging I was finally able to find the cause of this:
Too old config file.
Uhm ... what? Well - some of these accounts have been around since TB2. Some newer ones were enhanced by copying the prefs.js from existing accounts. And so there's a weird TB bugreport that is mostly triggered by some bits being rewritten around Firefox 30, and the config parser screwing up with translating 'old' into 'new', and ... effectively ... IMAP being not-whitelisted, thus by default blacklisted, and hilarity happens.
Should you encounter this bug you "just" need to revert to a prefs.js from before the update (sigh) and then remove all lines involving "capability.policy".
Then update and ... things work. Whew.
Why not just remove profile and start with a clean one you say? Well ... for one TB gets brutally unusably slow if you have emails. So just re-reading the mailbox content from a local fast IMAP server will take ~8h and TB will not respond to user input during that time.
And then you manually have to go into eeeevery single subfolder so that TB remembers it is there and actually updates it. That's about one work-day per user lost to idiocy, so sed'ing the config file into compliance is the easy way out.
Thank you, Mozilla, for keeping our lives exciting!