Movemail seems missing from account setup since some months. Dunno why, but nobody complained either.

I think it's time we dropped support for it: it's only been available for linux and must by it's very nature be used by a very tiny part of our users.

I'm not very happy about the removal. While movemail may not be used much, it also wasn't too large code-wise and was quite simple to understand as a protocol (as there was no communication with the server).

Can we get any stats whether it is completely unused by people? If it works in TB68, nobody using it may have noticed it broke later.

Since we have so many users, there must be someone, somewhere using it. Unfortunately we don't yet have stats on that.
It's not huge code-wise no, but I don't think that's a good reason keeping it. Everything does take effort to maintain and that is time away from something else.

If keeping it involves UI complications it seems like an easy call to remove even if the actual code for it isn't that big. We have so many edge cases in our UI as it is.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #3)

Since we have so many users, there must be someone, somewhere using it. Unfortunately we don't yet have stats on that.
It's not huge code-wise no, but I don't think that's a good reason keeping it. Everything does take effort to maintain and that is time away from something else.

Someone, somewhere is using it and provided a patch in bug 1571633

And somehow it started working again... oh well. I still think we should remove it to be able to clean up the UI for setting up accounts. But not for 78.

Telemetry showed this is basically unused indeed: only 0.0084% has an account set up.

That is a deceptive framing of the statistic, if it is based on all platforms. This is a linux only feature, so any honest analysis would state what percentage of linux accounts have a movemail account. Then, the absolute number of users who would be affected should be presented.

(In reply to alta88 from comment #8)

That is a deceptive framing of the statistic, if it is based on all platforms. This is a linux only feature, so any honest analysis would state what percentage of linux accounts have a movemail account. Then, the absolute number of users who would be affected should be presented.

Hard to agree with this, unless you are arguing Linux features deserve outsized support regardless of # of users. In any case, if you go by monthly user counts, we have ~180K Linux users(~1% of all) and 2101 of them have a movemail account in their profile. That only amounts to 1.17% of Linux users, and frankly, I would consider it to be a low number of users for an add-on, nevermind a core feature.

And of those globally(!!) 2101 users, there's no saying how many actually are using it - just that they once tried to set one up, maybe just to see what it was.

Successful try: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try-comm-central&selectedTaskRun=ajLUN_fQTrifkYJA7-xS1A.0&revision=6f0455f5a9b1ecff27de4fa8a8f9f28fb1981322

The included string were all I could find.

Pushed by mkmelin@iki.fi:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/931a1fb770eb
remove movemail support. r=benc

Is there a suggested upgrade path for users affected by this removal, and will there be any warning before auto-update installs a version that won't work with the user's current config? (It's technically not just Linux users BTW; I'm using movemail on macOS.) Could this functionality be provided by an add-on? If not, or if that's not the best way of doing it, what would be your recommended path forward?

There is no warning no, people will have to re-configure.
It's unclear to me why anyone wanted to use it in the first place. The upgrade path is to configure thunderbird to access that mail spool through normal means: imap or pop.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #16)

It's unclear to me why anyone wanted to use it in the first place.

Same motivation as this bug, to avoid unnecessary complexity (of maintaining a dovecot/whatever instance for one user).

This is horrible. I'll have to switch to a more full-featured email client.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #0)

Movemail seems missing from account setup since some months. Dunno why, but nobody complained either.

I think it's time we dropped support for it: it's only been available for linux and must by it's very nature be used by a very tiny part of our users.

I think "nobody complained" is because of, for instance, in Debian we have v78 of thunderbird which is installed by vast majority of users, including me:

$ apt-cache policy thunderbird
thunderbird:
Installed: 1:78.13.0-1
Candidate: 1:78.13.0-1
Version table:
1:91.0~b5-1 130
130 https://deb.debian.org/debian experimental/main amd64 Packages
*** 1:78.13.0-1 990
500 https://deb.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
990 https://deb.debian.org/debian sid/main amd64 Packages

But recently I wanted to switch to the new version, and I noticed my unix mail account is missing. There's was no info about removing the account and for some days I didn't even notice that the whole account was deleted. Fortunately, the mail stayed intact, so I installed the previous version and restored the backup settings.

So now you have one unhappy user. :] So basically if this feature is removed for good, I think I have to look for another mail client...

Seems that I also have to change to another MUA for my users as this major feature was one of the reasons to choose thunderbird. Why has this feature been removed ... there is absolutely no reason to skip support of the UNIX major behaviour of local mail delivery on a multi user system.
IMHO this is simply empty-headed.

(In reply to Dr. Werner Fink from comment #20)

Seems that I also have to change to another MUA for my users as this major feature was one of the reasons to choose thunderbird. Why has this feature been removed ... there is absolutely no reason to skip support of the UNIX major behaviour of local mail delivery on a multi user system.
IMHO this is simply empty-headed.

Apparently they removed it because no one complained because no one was using the TB version where they removed the support. In Debian we still have v78.13.0:

# apt-cache policy thunderbird
thunderbird:
  Installed: 1:78.13.0-1
  Candidate: 1:78.13.0-1
  Version table:
     1:91.0~b5-1 130
        130 https://deb.debian.org/debian experimental/main amd64 Packages
 *** 1:78.13.0-1 990
        500 https://deb.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
        990 https://deb.debian.org/debian sid/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

So I really want to see what happens when this v91 comes into play.

(In reply to Mikhail Morfikov from comment #21)

(In reply to Dr. Werner Fink from comment #20)

Seems that I also have to change to another MUA for my users as this major feature was one of the reasons to choose thunderbird. Why has this feature been removed ... there is absolutely no reason to skip support of the UNIX major behaviour of local mail delivery on a multi user system.
IMHO this is simply empty-headed.

Apparently they removed it because no one complained because no one was using the TB version where they removed the support. In Debian we still have v78.13.0:

Apparently you didn't read the complete bug report including comment 9.

(In reply to WaltS48 [:walts48] from comment #22)

(In reply to Mikhail Morfikov from comment #21)

(In reply to Dr. Werner Fink from comment #20)

Seems that I also have to change to another MUA for my users as this major feature was one of the reasons to choose thunderbird. Why has this feature been removed ... there is absolutely no reason to skip support of the UNIX major behaviour of local mail delivery on a multi user system.
IMHO this is simply empty-headed.

Apparently they removed it because no one complained because no one was using the TB version where they removed the support. In Debian we still have v78.13.0:

Apparently you didn't read the complete bug report including comment 9.

And how are those stats collected? Does everyone who use TB send the data for creating the stats?

If someone complained earlier, we probably would have different situation now. Still thousands of users will be surprised when the update from v78->v91 will come and then you will see that people really need the feature. It's hard to expect from users to complain if they even don't know that the feature is removed because they use older TB version.

Sorry, for your loss.

Somebody did complain in this bug report.

As a Linux user for over 20 years, when I am setting up a new Newsgroup account, what do I need a movemail account for?

I don't know why or what you would use it for, I use it, for instance, to collect the system mail that is generated by various services/daemons. I get notified when something is wrong, etc. It's really convenient to the degree that I'll have to move to some other client when the feature is gone for good. The movemail feature in current Debian's Thunderbird still exists, so I have high hopes that it's going to stay this way, at least here.

For now, I created a Debian bug report, to make this movemail feature remove more visible and attract the people who would be affected by the change:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=993526

I also use Fedora and TH 78.11 with Movemail.
Removing Movemail will force me to change mUA. Is there a chance to see an addon that adds the Movemail functionality again?

If one doesn't know why at first no one complained, one may be out of touch with reality. The reality is most Unix & GNU/Linux OS distributions don't upgrade fast, and almost no user is going to compile Thunderbird or build a package themselves. People mentioned Debian, Fedora weren't upgraded yet. Neither were Slackware or FreeBSD... so the original big three GNU/Linux and the most-used Unix, and most others were like them. Getting your system mail without having to add a POP3 or IMAP server is an important feature. I hope movemail will be readded or a lot of people will just switch, and you'll lose donations from some of the most enthusiastic people.

IMHO this is a hard regression as removing this feature definitely breaks user systems and setups thereout ... therefore I've open a bug #1728778

Hello,
I was one of the 0.00001% of user of this feature, and I'm didn't see a real need to remove it. It wasn't broken.
Another user who has reinstalled the previous release (78) because of this lack.
https://www.mageialinux-online.org/forum/topic-29318-1+firefox-91.php#m292403

The stats are probably totally unreliable. Before I retired I ran a medium sized cluster that was airgapped from the internet. We used TB to collate system reports, log analyses and general mail. On my connected systems, and now at home, I continued to use TB to read the mail messages generated by the various systems at home. I keep my systems fully updated using Alma (used to be CentOS, but that's another story) and am totally flummoxed by this decision. Quite apart from being unable to read important system messages the upgrade has deleted my backup and logwatch records.

I've just tried a downgrade (never a long term solution), but then I need a new profile so I would appear to lose my existing messages. Not very helpful.

I am indeed on of the affected users who simply didn't know this discussion was happening, because I was using TB 78. I agree completely with David Chmelik's comment!

I have been using Movemail for more than 15 years I guess.... (probably even longer). To my complete surprise even the mailbox itself was removed from the GUI after the upgrade. So not only the feature is removed, it also breaks -without any warning!- TB configurations/installations.

Telemetry should never be the major basis for decision making, how many (tech) users are blocking it or have disabled it besides myself?
By removing Movemail one of the distinctive features of Thunderbird is now gone, I read in this thread that the code is not complex so I really don't see any reason for the removal. And the 'gui cleanup' argument really makes me laugh....

IMHO Movemail should be brought back to TB or should be made available via an Add-On a.s.a.p. I don't want to run a local POP or IMAP server!

P.S. I am indeed also considering other e-mail clients now. That's a pity because my usage of Thunderdbird and predecessors goes back to the nineties with Netscape Navigator and Communicator...

Too late. I'm migrating to Evolution which still works.

(In reply to Patrick Leliveld from comment #32)

I have been using Movemail for more than 15 years I guess.... (probably even longer). To my complete surprise even the mailbox itself was removed from the GUI after the upgrade. So not only the feature is removed, it also breaks -without any warning!- TB configurations/installations.

That is the point for me, too: It breaks installations without a warning. This is really bad and should have been a "no go". You need at least need a warning or an "exit strategy". Even some addons are broken because of this.

I also got bitten by this and although I found a workaround in the end, it was really not cool having to lose time reverse-engineering why emails had just "disappeared" to eventually end up back at this bug-report. Posting a big emphatic heads-up that "we are removing an entire subcomponent" and an incremental deprecation -> obsoletion strategy would have saved me (& others) a lot of valuable time and frustration.

Also, I don't know any sysadmin/devops colleagues who don't make their very first post-install task "disable all the privacy-leakage and telemetry in all the apps that use them". I think trusting such telemetry too exclusively is probably mostly just measuring "how many Windows & Mac users haven't worked out how to disable telemetry yet" more than anything (and they will almost certainly be the people not using Movemail-like functionality)...

Anyway, for whoever wants to know a slightly kludgy but likely "good enough" workaround, do this:

• context-click on the "Local Folders" and find the "Local Directory" address
• close thunderbird (maybe be paranoid and pgrep to ensure you don't have any persistent subprocess still running)
• then create a symlink ln -s /var/mail/[SPOOL_FILE_NAME] /path/to/the/Local-Directory/address/you/found/above/Inbox (obviously ensure there isn't already an Inbox subfolder there, or otherwise create a differently named subfolder-symlink)

When I opened thunderbird it indexed it OK and after exiting and reopening thunderbird several times the symlink has stayed in place without problem.

By the way because things borked in pieces for me and I ended up with three separate partial mbox files in different places (long story), I wanted to merge them back together in a tidy chronological order so I came up with the following ugly oneliner which someone else might find useful. The sort field-numbers are based on the "From ..." lines in my local emails - perhaps the fields will be different for you if your locale is sufficiently different? (but you should be able to work it out). NB: Make backup copies first, don't get mad at me if you shred the copy you work on, don't try to use this as-is but instead understand the bits you need, etc:

mb2md -m &&
  mb2md -s ~/.thunderbird-borked-1/xx.default-default/Mail/Local\ Folders/Inbox -d ~/rescued-maildir-1 &&
  mb2md -s ~/.thunderbird-borked-2/yy.default-default/Mail/Local\ Folders/Inbox -d ~/rescued-maildir-2 &&
  cat $(
    for y in ~/Mail ~/rescued-maildir-1 ~/rescued-maildir-2; do
      pushd "$y" &&
        for x in *; do
          head -q -n 1 "$x" |
            tr -d '\n' &&
            echo " $x"
        done |
          sort -n -k 7,7 -k 4M,4M -k 5,5 -k 6,6 |
          cut -d' ' -f8 |
          sed -e "s:^:${y}/:" &&
        popd
    done
  ) >~/all-rescued-mail

@Rowan Thorpe: I always call that a 'Frankenstein solution', because in the end it simply is not sustainable. As long as this bug (regression....) is not re-opened I am afraid nothing is going to change. Who is able to arrange such a thing?

Regarding the usage of telemetry data I would like to add a remark for the developers to think about:
The story behind data is more important than the data itself. Or more precisely: the reason why you are missing certain pieces of data may be more meaningful than the data you have.

The use case of Movemail in TB has many aspects that reflects this remark:

• Tech savvy users often don't like telemetry and disables it (like myself).
• Many linux users don't upgrade often and missed the entire discussion (like myself).
• Offline, air-gapped or 'fenced' TB-setups which are not directly connected to the internet are not 'visible' in the data.
• etc.

TB has a more diverse user base than most other e-mail clients and that user base should be supported by appropriate developer decisions to keep them aboard, because it is the lifeline of the software! Removal of a distinctive little feature like Movemail is therefore a really bad move, because it alienates several hardcore users like myself (I contributed financially to the project in the past btw.)

TB developers should realize that by removing distinctive features you will end up with software that has no added value left. And within a field with many other e-mail clients the end is in that case closer than you might think. TB's should therefore focus on its niche to survive, and this removal clearly isn't a point in the right direction. With more than 25 years of experience in IT I know where that leads to....

@Patrick Leliveld: I'd go further and say what I posted is not even a "solution" (Frankenstein or otherwise), just a workaround. I agree that such things (as symlinking out from a Thunderbird mailbox) add-up and are not sustainable "properly".

I strongly agree with the rest of what you wrote too. Playing only to the "middle of the crowd" risks a race to the bottom in which email-clients are only left with trying to out-hype each other rather than distinguish themselves from each other functionally. I migrated to Thunderbird from Mutt (via a few good years on Emacs/mu4e with BBDB, etc), because whenever I would become a sporadic email user between projects I would forget key-bindings, and re-onboarding my muscle-memory (and revisiting forgotten configuration-syntax) would be too time-consuming. My point is that I hesitantly migrated to "graphical" Thunderbird from the hardcore keyboard-interface email clients, and it was not about "choosing Thunderbird" as much as it was about "choosing to avoid the alternative graphical clients". When moves like semi-stealth-lobotomising Movemail happen users like me start reconsidering the benefit/cost of returning our email-interaction back into the clutches of Emacs, along with taping key-binding cheatsheets to the wall, and so on. Then Thunderbird is back to competing with the other "popular" clients for users who send email as TOFU-in-HTML-by-replying-to-unrelated-threads-than-drag-and-dropping-inline-TNEF-encoded-attachments-and-don't-know-that-CC-and-BCC-exist.

@vbcoen, @Andrzej - Evolution seems to give most of the functionality of TB, and includes movemail functionality.

The symlink workaround does not seem to work as well as I thought. If I delete a message in TB folder it stays in the /var/mail/user.

(In reply to Andrzej Zięba from comment #41)

The symlink workaround does not seem to work as well as I thought. If I delete a message in TB folder it stays in the /var/mail/user.

That was indeed the same here. It might be a permission issue, but in the end I decided to install Evolution next to Thunderbird to be able to manage the unix mailspool. What a pity...

Likewise but I also changed the mail folder as in :

chmod a+wr /var/spool/mail/vince

giving

ll /var/spool/mail/vince
-rw-rw-rw- 1 vince mail 0 Dec 1 15:05 /var/spool/mail/vince

and same effect deleting mails have no effect.

Hi,

Just wanted to make you aware that this feature was very much used by web developers for testing emails on a local web server.

I am struggling to find another mail client that is able to receive local mail in the same way and easy to set up.

Also, there are many guides online for setting up a local mail server for testing and pretty much all of them have a setup guide for Thunderbird.

Having to resort to using Mutt but not able to view as HTML email.

(In reply to Rarewave from comment #45)

Having to resort to using Mutt but not able to view as HTML email.

Evolution and Claws Mail have the feature. To have HTML displayed in Claws you need a plugin though, and it still works kind of crappy.

Today, after more than 20 years, all my local mails in thunderbird were disappeared. This is very terrible for me and that is not fine.
Thank very very much to Rowan Thorpe for his work around.

I spent a whole day to figure out why Local Inbox is no longer visible. At last, I read this Bugzilla. I am disappointed to know that movemail is discontinued. Many tools are sending me messages and notifications, which are critical to my work. Running an imap server is overkill for reading just those messages. Thunderbird is essentially abandoning many Linux users. Meanwhile, I will use symbolic link as work around (Many thanks to Rowan Thorp). Then, I am going to look for a better email client unless TB reinstates movemal.

If I can just give a real world use case where this feature was being used by development teams:

As web applications go there are often automated transactional emails or customer emails, even some that need to be sent to administrators of the application.

These emails need to be coded, templates crafted and then sent somewhere for viewing. This all needs to happen in a local environment (and often isolated from having an actual live email server running). we would set the server hosts and send address to something like testing@localhost.com that the mail spool can catch.

The thunderbird client was very simple to integrate with sendmail and postfix to catch these HTML emails while testing.

We would very much appreciate giving some thought to add the feature back in.

Thank you

Just another user who would like movemail support reinstated, thanks.

Another disappointed (read: angry) Debian Linux user here.

After I verified that symlinking the local mailbox into the Thunderbird local mail tree doesn't work properly (the symlink got overwritten by a regular file) I sought for the most lightweight solution and I ended up installing mailutils-pop3d.

And of course I don't like telemetry, therefore my setups don't appear on your statistics: your reasoning was wrong and you ended up acting just as many market developers which don't support Linux users since "they aren't a relevant commercial target".

Hoping you'll revise this ill-minded decision soon or later.

(In reply to Maurizio Avogadro from comment #52)

Another disappointed (read: angry) Debian Linux user here.

(...) I sought for the most lightweight solution and I ended up installing mailutils-pop3d.

(...)

Hoping you'll revise this ill-minded decision soon or later.

Actually you have proven that their decision was right:
"Those tech savvy Linux users that we do not care about will circumvent the problem by installing pop3 or imap server and will keep using Thunderbird."

Just do not expect them to revise their decision based on your example.

Or as I did and go elsewhere.

(In reply to azi from comment #53)

[...]
"Those tech savvy Linux users that we do not care about [...]

This is exactly what makes me angry: why, why the hell shouldn't Mozilla care about "tech savvy" users? Is Thunderbird made only for dumb users?!? Is that your opinion about users?

Developers should define healthy defaults for all users but allow "savvy" ones (thus respecting them) to customize the settings to better adapt the software to their needs: if I wanted someone else to decide how to use my PC I didn't choose Thunderbird, but Outlook. Movemail support was a rather simple functionality (I bet the effort for maintaining it wasn't huge) which allowed any user to easily have local mail between other mail, so that it doesn't go unnoticed. Keeping users out of the control room only leads them to remain ignorant and vulnerable.

One more Debian Linux User. It's one thing to drop movemail support and to no longer import new e-mail from such a unix mail file. But to completely stop processing and showing e-mails which have been imported in the past is simply annoying and a reason to evaluate other MUA after more than 20 years of using TB, respectively, Mozilla mail.

I just also spent my day to understand why all mylocal email were not received in TDB anymore and discovered here why.
I use a Debian box and TDB 91 just appear (january i think) into the official Debian 9 packages.
Obviously I also tried what discribed vbcoen here and got the same conclusion.

I agree completely with David Chmelik's comment and shared achocho's issues

Unfortunately, I don't want to use evolution as it is a gas factory for me. so I have to find a simple solution.

So now you have one more unhappy user.

(In reply to azi from comment #41)

The symlink workaround does not seem to work as well as I thought. If I delete a message in TB folder it stays in the /var/mail/user.

Confirmed .... I have the same trouble!

Yeah, I have some rather "earthy" comments to the individual(s) that decided to remove movemail. Rather than inspire further hardheadedness on their part, just add yet another pissed off user. Thanks for creating a way for me to waste 4 hours of my time folks.

Another Debian GNU/Linux user, "upgraded" from Thunderbird v78 to v91...
And now, forced to use "mail" from the terminal.
That's sad.

I just upgraded to v91 and found this terrible news. Guys, if you want to do stuff just for the majority of users, then you should work for Facebook. How much resources would consume keeping that super simple feature as Movemail is??! I don't get you.
Anyways, I am switching from Thunderbird to Kmail. Movemail works there even better than it used to in Thunderbird. You can find it under: Add incoming account, Own account, Mbox.

Same here, another very unhappy debian user. Spent a few hours trying to figure out what happened to my mails. I also use TB to monitor my systems. And of course I have telemetry disabled.

Hi, just another victim of this removal ='(

As(In reply to Maurizio Avogadro from comment #52)

After I verified that symlinking the local mailbox into the Thunderbird local mail tree doesn't work properly (the symlink got overwritten by a regular file) I sought for the most lightweight solution and I ended up installing mailutils-pop3d.

Works like a charm, Thanks!.

Just to clarify to other people, you only need to install mailutils-pop3d and restart your system. In Thunderbird just add your mail as a normal mail account, user@localhost and your login password

Just to clarify to other people, you only need to install mailutils-pop3d and restart your system. In Thunderbird just add your mail as a normal mail account, user@localhost and your login password

Is it configured to listen only to local connections by default?

(In reply to azi from comment #65)

Is it configured to listen only to local connections by default?

I don't know, I got a firewall (ufw) just in case

(In reply to madacol10 from comment #66)

(In reply to azi from comment #65)

Is it configured to listen only to local connections by default?

I don't know, I got a firewall (ufw) just in case

I use this configuration (/etc/mailutils.conf): this way the daemon only listens on localhost TCP/995 and also protects your logins with SSL (of course you have to generate your own keys and certificate):

======== 8< ========
program pop3d {
expire 365;
login-delay 60;
pidfile /run/pop3d.pid;
server 127.0.0.1:995 {
tls-mode connection;
tls {
ssl-certificate-file /etc/ssl/certs/myselfsignedcert.pem;
ssl-key-file /etc/ssl/private/myprivatekey.key;
ssl-ca-file /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/mylocalca.crt;
ssl-priorities PFS;
};
};
};
======== >8 ========

/path/to/pop3d --config-help will output an example fully commented configuration file.

When I'll find some further time to dedicate to this issue I'll try to investigate mailutils-imap4d which possibly can fit even better my needs.
But the best option would definitely be having movemail support on Thunderbird...

Another very disappointed victim.
I'm sure that to delete this functionality worth more effort than let it be.
And I agree with @plelivel, the 'gui cleanup' argument really makes me laugh too...

The reason for the removal is laughable: There was a bug for a few months and you just conclude there are no users? No, the users just hate upgrading because there always are awful surprises like "lol, we removed a perfectly fine feature because we can, yolo!" Please, stop making it worse, and I promise I'll update more often!

Great, now I have to use a workaround in order to make my e-mail-reading program read my (locally-generated) e-mails, from cronjobs and other scripts.

Another very disappointed victim.

What is the exact content for the config file when using it with the Linux system mail facility, which is internally used only, i.e., picks up o/p from crontab processes.

Apparently the devs have not learned that critically important lesson about software:

Programming is like sex...one mistake, and you support it forever.

You may not think this was a needed feature, but it wasn't costing you anything to leave it in Thunderbird. Aside from ego, there was NO legitimate reason to remove it.

Well done.

(In reply to azi from comment #65)

Just to clarify to other people, you only need to install mailutils-pop3d and restart your system. In Thunderbird just add your mail as a normal mail account, user@localhost and your login password

Is it configured to listen only to local connections by default?

A default install of mailutils-pop3d or mailutils-imap4d will accept external connections as well. If configured thoroughly it will work fine, but the mailtutils solution is definitely not trivial and is insecure when implemented incorrectly.

It is therefore actually ridiculous that the Thunderbird Devs are pushing / advising former Movemail users into this direction (which they do in the release notes of TB v91). I think they simply don't have a clue how varied the userbase of Movemail/Unixmail was, they are not only power users or sysadmins. Apparently the Devs don't care.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #0)

Movemail seems missing from account setup since some months. Dunno why, but nobody complained either.

I think it's time we dropped support for it: it's only been available for linux and must by it's very nature be used by a very tiny part of our users.

I am another disappointed user.
I am using Debian 10 and Thunderbird installed from default debian repositories.
So, of course I was not affected by the initial bug and did not fill any bug reports that time.

Another frustrated Debian user here. For years, I read the debug mails of my development systems via Thunderbird, now I have to (a) install another software to to this or (b) use another MUA, which is not what I want. There is a reason for keeping things simple and not installing a IMAP or POP3 server on the machines. So please, bring back the support in Thunderbird.

Removing this feature means I can no longer easily test text/HTML emails in a commonly used GUI based email client. I also don't plan to install IMAP/POP3 on our development hosts. It is very frustrating, I will now have to find a decent email client that I can use.

I am not in a good mood either, not so much because the feature was removed but because of how it was removed. There was no advance notice whatsoever. I just did a routine distro system update, and suddenly, not only did I stop receiving critically important system movemail messages without even knowing it, but all of my important archived movemail messages and folders were gone, just like that, with no way in the interface to access them again.

This incredibly irresponsible move is deeply concerning. The Thunderbird developers responsible for this change have sent a loud and clear message that they simply don't care about their users or their data. There is absolutely no excuse not to have had the new version display a big warning message that the feature was going to be removed and give the user a chance to close the software before it mangles their profile so that even a downgrade to the previous working version of Thunderbird can be performed. Or at the very least, provided a way to access the existing message folders. And all because of some sort of hopelessly flawed “statistics” that claim that “only” up to 2000 users would be impacted, without any regard to the potential severity of the consequences for those particular users?

It certainly makes me feel good to essentially be told that I am one of those “minority” users who are worth nothing to the Thunderbird project.

Today I have just lost a great deal of respect for the developers. Not to mention most of my trust in the Thunderbird product as a whole going forward.

This is also a great way to discourage users from upgrading, even for security reasons. No one wants software they rely on to stop working and their data to be held hostage and then have to waste significant amounts of valuable time trying to recover. Especially when it strikes them by surprise.

It seem that if you use delete/archive a mail in mbox, thunderbird will not really remove it in mbox file. The deletion is record in *.msf or somewhere. One can really delete the mail in mbox with Compact in context menu on the folder, which will remove the deleted mail in mbox.

It seem that thunderbird will rebuild the msf if any new mail added to the mbox file; then the deleted mail will appear again.

Therefore, if you use symlink for inbox or use $HOME/.forward to send local mail to thunderbird, compact the inbox after delete/archive mail in local inbox.

@gold holk

That works a treat, many thanks for the fix

I am not letting Thunderbird programmer off the hook though - shoddy and very unprofessional programming removing existing features that make an update not backwards compatible etc and er, yes I do know something on the subject seeing as I have been doing it since 1963.

The symlink work around is pretty flawed:

• New mail doesn't seem to show up unless you delete the xxx.msf file that TB automatically creates when it sees the symlink first time.
• Delete message doesn't work without yet another work around (haven't tested it actually works).
• Asking TB to "Get messages" won't check updates local mail folder.

Beyond that the evidence that hardly anyone movemail accounts is using seems very flawed: A. the v78 thing already mentioned. B. Telemetry is disabled on my TB. I think that's the default conf on Debian and probably other distros too. If it's not, many people disable as first thing.

+1 for adding back.

For all of us looking for another option (given they are not going to fix it), I found Claws Mail (https://www.claws-mail.org/). Lightweight mail client with just what I need to read my notifications via local mail. It works great.

(In reply to Rarewave from comment 45)

Having to resort to using Mutt but not able to view as HTML email.
(In reply to azi from comment 46)
Evolution and Claws Mail have the feature. To have HTML displayed in Claws you need a plugin though, and it still works kind of crappy.
(In reply to vguzman from comment #80)
For all of us looking for another option (given they are not going to fix it), I found Claws Mail (https://www.claws-mail.org/). Lightweight mail client with just what I need to read my notifications via local mail. It works great.

Claws had buggy mbox plugin code and doesn't let you write HTML mail. I used to like Claws but better choices would be SeaMonkey (older/lighter Mozilla and not buggy mbox) or InterLink (Thunderbird Fork, but last I checked didn't handle newer login authorizations used by Google, Yahoo, etc.) by Binary Outcast, KMail, or (very system-resource-heavy) GNOME EVolution. I'll probably use SeaMonkey because the rest don't seem adequate.

For people who resorted to the hassle of setup POPD server on your PC, remember, if you're on a laptop, that might be risky (without firewall) but on desktop behind router (normally has firewall) that may be okay, but you may be forced to use passwords, but UNIX tradition is the user/programmer/sysadmin decides whether they need passwords, and on a PC behind firewall and maybe isolated location, they may be doing that securely, so software shouldn't break UNIX tradition (as thunderbird did.)

It beggars belief Thunderbird developers didn't also state obvious solution: switch back to old Mozilla/Seamonkey.

My previous comment was in reply to three people, including whom appeared to be in Rarewave's comment (but I replied to separately) but the comment box doesn't say it's using any sort of formatting that's been around decades, just that some new type is 'supported.' Oh well. Please make Bugzilla more clear and posts user-editable to correct errors.

After running Thunderbird for the last 10 years or so we removed it several months ago and have all switched over to Mailspring for handling normal email around the office.

For testing emails locally, we now use Evolution which seems fine and does the job.

For production testing of emails we then run through Litmus.

Quite a few machines have dropped thunderbird as a result of the feature removal which is a shame because we would prefer to support open source projects.

Oh, I wondered why I wasn't receiving local mails - turns out this absolutely crap show was done behind users' backs. Well done. Good work.

(In reply to madacol10 from comment #64)

Just to clarify to other people, you only need to install mailutils-pop3d and restart your system. In Thunderbird just add your mail as a normal mail account, user@localhost and your login password

Can confirm this works nicely, no configuration needed, but you indeed have to restart the computer.

@Developer There should have been a warning for users of movemail with this workaround given.

(In reply to Arvidt from comment #85)

(In reply to madacol10 from comment #64)

Just to clarify to other people, you only need to install mailutils-pop3d and restart your system. In Thunderbird just add your mail as a normal mail account, user@localhost and your login password

Can confirm this works nicely, no configuration needed, but you indeed have to restart the computer.

@Developer There should have been a warning for users of movemail with this workaround given.

It will not start automatically on every system, on both my Debian and Xubuntu systems it doesn't and I haven't find a proper solution for that.
Besides, mailutils-pop3d is also accepting external connections by default, you should be aware of that and secure it if needed (as already stated earlier in the thread). Another proof that these alternative solutions aren't trivial or that easy to implement...

But the Thunderbird devs really don't care, they are more busy with bells and whistles than with functionality that really makes TB distinctive.

Pulling this out was a mistake. I'm sorry that this decision was made and I'm here to remedy it. We're going to bring Movemail back. If someone here hits us with a patch, it will go faster. - Thunderbird Product Manager

Let's see if we can simply back out this without too much trouble, otherwise we can create a patch that reverts the changes and uplift it to 102.
Gently pinging Ben and Geoff to see how doable this is.

(In reply to Ryan Lee Sipes from comment #87)

Pulling this out was a mistake. I'm sorry that this decision was made and I'm here to remedy it. We're going to bring Movemail back.

Thank you for this decision, even if it comes too late to help many of us (personally I had to spend the time to set up Dovecot back in November.)

(In reply to plelivel from comment #86)

(In reply to Arvidt from comment #85)
It will not start automatically on every system, on both my Debian and Xubuntu systems it doesn't and I haven't find a proper solution for that.

You are right, the next day I experienced, too, that the systemd mailutils-pop3d.service did not start anymore suddenly (on Debian 11 Bullseye). Since I did not want to investigate any further with that crap (I guess it's a problem with the systemd unit), I followed the solution mentioned here:
https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=749593#p749593
and purged mailutils-pop3d and installed popa3d instead. This works now out of the box, also the next day.

Hm, there is no development of popa3d anymore since ten years, according to https://www.openwall.com/popa3d/CHANGES.shtml
Also, sadly I could not find any option to let it listen on localhost only (since it transmits all data in plaintext), which is poor.

(In reply to Ryan Lee Sipes from comment #87)

We're going to bring Movemail back.

Thank you very much. I wondered, too, why TB should not implement the parsing of a simple mbox file anymore, should not be so hard I guess, and the parsing code would even already exist?
Adding an account of type "mbox" would just need to enter the filename (e.g. /var/mail/alice) as I understand.

I would suggest not to name it "movemail" anymore, I find this name confusing. Maybe call it just "local mbox file"? But I admit that I do not know if the former "movemail" account had any more features, though.

Hi, thank you for this update.

We will look forward to being able to use Thunderbird again for our local email testing.

(In reply to Ryan Lee Sipes from comment #87)

Pulling this out was a mistake. I'm sorry that this decision was made and I'm here to remedy it. We're going to bring Movemail back. If someone here hits us with a patch, it will go faster. - Thunderbird Product Manager

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #88)

Let's see if we can simply back out this without too much trouble, otherwise we can create a patch that reverts the changes and uplift it to 102.
Gently pinging Ben and Geoff to see how doable this is.

Great news! Where it will be tracked? Here or bug 1727931 or bug 1728778. None of them have been reopened so far.

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #88)

Let's see if we can simply back out this without too much trouble, otherwise we can create a patch that reverts the changes and uplift it to 102.

No a simple backout won't work, there's quite a bit of front-end things that would need fixing up plus the XPCOM registration has changed. Also the strings are gone.

You might consider using bug 1727931 or bug 1728778 to restore the feature. A re-implementation in JS is also an option.

Perhaps making an Add On is easier than reimplementing it completely?

I need this feature to check the emails sent by daemons, otherwise I will have to ditch Thunderbird, there is no point in using another client just to check emails sent by the daemons. Zfs-zed sends notifications this way and I could possibly lose all my data if I fail to see an email warning me about disk errors.

Please make this feature available again!

(In reply to Ryan Lee Sipes from comment #87)

Pulling this out was a mistake. I'm sorry that this decision was made and I'm here to remedy it. We're going to bring Movemail back. If someone here hits us with a patch, it will go faster. - Thunderbird Product Manager

Any news on the 'revival' of this feature in Thunderbird?

(In reply to Ryan Lee Sipes from comment #87)

Pulling this out was a mistake. I'm sorry that this decision was made and I'm here to remedy it. We're going to bring Movemail back. If someone here hits us with a patch, it will go faster. - Thunderbird Product Manager

As this bug(task) is now closed, is there another for the repair of this "much needed" by "not many people" feature?

(In reply to Juan Burgos from comment #101)

As this bug(task) is now closed, is there another for the repair of this "much needed" by "not many people" feature?

See comment #96.

I'm also a complainer... but not optimistic at all regarding the lack of treatment of important bugs and requests for 20 years (e.g. all the ones I've commented)

FTR, I have no plans to drop movemail.. Given I fixed it. Assuming the Google Cartel doesn't completely kill it.. There will always be a place for different kinds of mail clients.. From the uber modern to the anachronistically classic styles and feature sets.

(In reply to Matt A. Tobin [:BinOC] from comment #104)

FTR, I have no plans to drop movemail.. Given I fixed it. Assuming the Google Cartel doesn't completely kill it.. There will always be a place for different kinds of mail clients.. From the uber modern to the anachronistically classic styles and feature sets.

It's not clear to me what I can read in your comment. Do you mean that you reimplemented Movemail in TB? If so, in what release can we expect it back? So far I haven't found any clear backlog or feature request where Movemail was mentioned except for this thread....

(In reply to Matt A. Tobin [:BinOC] from comment #104)

FTR, I have no plans to drop movemail.. Given I fixed it. Assuming the Google Cartel doesn't completely kill it.. There will always be a place for different kinds of mail clients.. From the uber modern to the anachronistically classic styles and feature sets.

+1 comment #105

It's not clear to me what I can read in your comment. Do you mean that you reimplemented Movemail in TB? If so, in what release can we expect it back? So far I haven't found any clear backlog or feature request where Movemail was mentioned except for this thread....

I would be very happy if this feature would be reimplemented / activated again!

(In reply to Matt A. Tobin [:BinOC] from comment #104)

FTR, I have no plans to drop movemail.. Given I fixed it. Assuming the Google Cartel doesn't completely kill it.. There will always be a place for different kinds of mail clients.. From the uber modern to the anachronistically classic styles and feature sets.

+1 comment #105

I also would be very happy if this feature could be re-implemented.

Movemail support will be re-implemented in bug 1802145

Thanks everyone for your feedback!

There's an intention to restore movemail support in bug 1802145, which is strictly reserved for the technical re-implementation - no further advocacy on that bug please. If you really still need to say something which hasn't been said before, it will better to comment on bug 1727931. Restoring the feature needs planning, work and resources, we cannot just back out bug 1625741.

(In reply to Ryan Lee Sipes from comment #87)

Pulling this out was a mistake. I'm sorry that this decision was made and I'm here to remedy it. We're going to bring Movemail back. If someone here hits us with a patch, it will go faster. - Thunderbird Product Manager

(In reply to Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan) from comment #95)

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #88)

Let's see if we can simply back out this without too much trouble, otherwise we can create a patch that reverts the changes and uplift it to 102.

No a simple backout won't work, there's quite a bit of front-end things that would need fixing up plus the XPCOM registration has changed. Also the strings are gone.