It would be useful for getting a basic understanding of the standard setups people have to know how many accounts they have and the type of those accounts.

For chat, we could do im+protocol as a type.

This patch reports account types every time Thunderbird starts. For im accounts, use im_protocol as
histogram bucket label. Also added a mochitest.

If in msgMail3PaneWindow.js I write

#ifndef MOZ_SUITE
  setTimeout(reportAccountTypes, 0);
#endif

Tests stuck and failed after a few minutes. Don't know why.

Learned about AppConstants, use

  if (!AppConstants.MOZ_SUITE) {
    setTimeout(reportAccountTypes, 0);
  }

Hmm, I don't know what we want to do with these no longer working types:
facebook, skype, yahoo at least. And twitter is also permanently broken.
We probably want to fiter them out from ever being sent out.

Please do not do that -- we want to know if anyone is left using them so we can remove the code eventually.

It might make sense to report instant messaging accounts as a different metric for what it's worth. Isn't a huge deal though, should be easy enough to filter after the fact if we wanted.

(In reply to Patrick Cloke [:clokep] from comment #5)

Please do not do that -- we want to know if anyone is left using them so we can remove the code eventually.

Well they aren't working at all are they? With zero chance of coming back (potentially twitter).

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #6)

(In reply to Patrick Cloke [:clokep] from comment #5)

Please do not do that -- we want to know if anyone is left using them so we can remove the code eventually.

Well they aren't working at all are they? With zero chance of coming back.

Right, but we still have code that gives a message saying "Hey, this isn't working, remove the account". It'd be nice to get rid of that eventually. Besides I'd just recommend doing any filtering like that server side anyway.

Is there a reason we don't simply remove such accounts in a migration? It's gotta be many major versions since those worked.

Just knowing how many feed (type="rss") accounts there are is only moderately interesting. Each feed subscription is effectively a 'server', equivalent to 1 newsgroup in an nntp account or 1 email account. It would be more useful to know how many subscriptions there are per account, and how many folders per feed account, given that a folder may contain 0, 1, or many subscriptions ('servers').

True, but I think that should be another item to collect separately. It doesn't really fit the data model in here.

Fixed review comments except the not working im types. Will wait for further confirmation.

Forgot to add browser_accountTelemetry.js

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #8)

Is there a reason we don't simply remove such accounts in a migration? It's gotta be many major versions since those worked.

Yes, because we have no idea how many people are using those accounts. :) Regardless, that's a separate bug than this. (And so close to the next ESR I don't know why we'd remove them right now.)

The short version from my POV is: don't add more code to handle these accounts separately, just report all the IM accounts.

I still don't understand what you mean. We know how many people are using them: 0. They do not work, since many years. They can not use them. People can (and will) of course have the old account listed, but the account would not be able to do anything.

Anyway, let's ignore that in this bug. I've filed bug 1641763.

Pushed by geoff@darktrojan.net:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/a378b70d4431
Add telemetry to count account types. r=mkmelin

I'm not sure if what I've just landed will also fix this failure that appeared on some Windows and Mac runs. I doubt it.

IMAP account number must be correct - "undefined" == 3 - JS frame :: chrome://mochitests/content/browser/comm/mail/test/browser/account/browser_accountTelemetry.js :: test_account_types :: line 103
RSS account number must be correct - "undefined" == 1 - JS frame :: chrome://mochitests/content/browser/comm/mail/test/browser/account/browser_accountTelemetry.js :: test_account_types :: line 108
IRC account number must be correct - "undefined" == 1 - JS frame :: chrome://mochitests/content/browser/comm/mail/test/browser/account/browser_accountTelemetry.js :: test_account_types :: line 113

:darktrojan I think I need to rework on this bug. The landed patch used histogram.add, which I guess will accumulate account numbers after restarting TB. There doesn't seem to be a histogram.set api, so I need to use scalar probe instead.

Please comment out or remove browser_accountTelemetry.js so that Treeherder can turn green, thanks.

I'll land a backout.

Changed to use keyed scalar probe instead of histogram probe.

Tests seem to pass on my Mac machine, will push to Try maybe tomorrow.

Lint.

A try run of attachment #9153812 [details] [diff] [review]:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try-comm-central&revision=1f247418dfe76de0d69d21748fb1d34ba28e4a28

Thanks, lint was done in comment 23, I didn't trigger a new Try run.

Changed to let type = account.incomingServer.type.

Pushed by mkmelin@iki.fi:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/49cb9cd70a75
follow-up - Use scalar probe to collect account numbers and types. r=mkmelin

Thunderbird 78.0b2:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/0525eca6f121