Matt, Eric, Walt do you have other suggestions?

Good stuff. Also Bug 643796 - about:support - indicate folders which may be near or exceed OS/Thunderbird limits. Or over N GB in size.

p.s. our UX foks would probably say we also need to make this more actionable or helpful to the user. So perhaps include a link to a KB article?

Bug 1305207 (number of folder/number of messages/ maybe size of msf that needs to be loaded).

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #2)

p.s. our UX foks would probably say we also need to make this more actionable or helpful to the user.

I don't know, I intend it mainly for devs and bugzilla triagers. If user reports slow operation of TB, we can ask him about some of these values, which he will see by accessing the page. Not everyone is able to easily count his folders, or messages. So this should help him. This info stays locally until the user decides to paste some of the numbers to a bug.

This is no automatically sent out telemetry.

Of course, if you can provide a list of KB articles for each object count, we could display them somewhere if a particular threshold is hit. It is not expected most common users will hit any of these so showing one or 2 links for power-users could be bearable.

The overall size of the global index would be interesting. Especially for chat users who have all their chat history stored there. Mine is over 4.1Gb in size and I stopped using chat in Thunderbird. When I look at the activity manager. Determining what messages to index appears to be an almost constant action, especially on RSS feeds. It is like SQLite has a limit around 4Gb

Files with a path exceeding 256 characters (we apparently create them in the wdseml code, but they do not copy well when the user migrates.

Use of MailDir! I spend a long while on a suport topic only to find the guy was using maildir. Probable cause of the issue but he will not try mbox, I would like to get the information early. (Mac/Linux users. Such a small user group, such a noisy one.)

Existence of duplicate accounts (We manage to identify they exist when we get to the account settings panel, while we should not allow the creation, it is a flag that their is an issue.

The physical media the profile is on, and if it is synchronised to a google or one drive. I do not know if that can be done, but I am seeing more and more folks "roling their own" synchronisation using cloud services to either directly host the profile, or to synchronise the folder. While other host the profile on a local NAS and "try" and share it between devices and even between concurrent users.

The presence of any active addon that is not for the current version. There are those that disable the strict version checking in preferences, and manage to get their old add-ons loaded, and half working. Then they want support for the problem the half working add-on causes. I still find it hard to cope with the numbers of people who refuse V60 because ThunderBrowse does not work with it.

It would be useful if there was a button to explicitly validate if certain files such as the global search index database and virtualfolders.dat were valid. Too often we need to tell a user to exit Thunderbird, delete certain files, and restart to see if the problem goes away. We still see some users who mess up the layout of their profile either due to mistakes made in how they configured syncing with Dropbox etc, or due to copying just part of a profile from one PC to another. It would be useful if there was a button to validate that the profile layout was valid, and try to identify what was wrong if it wasn't.

Very few users know how to to pull IMAP server capability information from mail . server. server# . capability, or even that it exists. Some tough problems are due to servers lying about their capabilities. It would be useful if there was a way to see that in this screen (don't just display the bitmask, identify the capabilities). It doesn't need to be displayed by default, just accessible.

p.s. our UX foks would probably say we also need to make this more actionable or helpful to the user. So perhaps
include a link to a KB article?

The current user interface requires too much inside knowledge (about the mozilla toolkit), and shows way too much of a Firefox influence. I have no idea what stylo is about for example. All I care about in the large graphics section is whether hardware support is enabled. I've never seen the large media section used for anything. Usually the only media issue is whether you have loaded the right driver under Linux, and this doesn't help towards that. While a KB article would help, that is not the right direction! I'd like to see tooltips added and the user interface made more mail-centric as a start. I don't know what the criteria is for the "important modified preferences" but usually only network.cookie.cookieBehavior and the printer settings is useful in the current listing.

We don't have a good mechanism to help a user see if they shoot themselves in the foot due to their character set encoding choices.

Microsoft windows troubleshooting wizards sometimes miss the obvious or give a false sense of reassurance, but they can also be very useful. They can reset parameters and get things working for people with either no technical knowledge, or just enough knowledge to be dangerous. We ought to think about adding a (non-platform specific) debugging wizard that has the user choose from a limited number of problem areas. The focus should be on starting small with very common easily identifiable problems, rather than trying to be very ambitious.

The standard cure for printer problems is to use the config editor to reset all of the printer specific settings. In my case that would be resetting print.printer_Brother_HL-L2320D_series.* . That's tough for many users. It would help if there was a button to restore printer settings to default settings.

The built-in session logging has no support for real startup problems. Its very focused on logging network protocols such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP etc. We don't have a good way to help users debug startup problems.

We could show the counts only if they cross some internal limit (e.g. >100 folders, >100 tags). We even do not need to >show precise numbers to not publish potentially private data, just whether the count is above the limit.

Sounds useful, but I'm mainly concerned whether the user has lots of messages in the inbox and doesn't compact it regularly. Corrupted inbox folders are still a major problem. Changing mail.purge_threshhold to a minimum of 1MB was a very poor decision. Yes, lots of users have large attachments. But many users also have mainly small messages with no attachments.

Thanks for the ideas Eric, but they look like material for a different bug, which you could kindly file.
This bug is about displaying some potential performance affecting statistics, not checking validity of or sanitizing any files.

If you do file a bug Eric, please CC me. Self diagnostics is a feature set Thunderbird sorely lacks. Even a permanent Validate button on the account settings and offers of some useful results, not just Ok and Fail.

No other suggestions from me.

could we "clean up" the troubleshooting information or at least recognise that the SUMO site only allows 10,000 line messages and apparently troubleshooting information often exceeds that.

(In reply to Matt from comment #9)

could we "clean up" the troubleshooting information or at least recognise that the SUMO site only allows 10,000 line messages and apparently troubleshooting information often exceeds that.

It is even worse if a user has multiple calendars - 27 lines per calendar, which seems excessive. I filed bug 1764143 to ask what can be done about it.