jaakko.luoto Reporter
	Description • 14 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: 

I'm planning a migration from TB2 to TB3 in a university environment. Our email addresses are in the form firstname.lastname@domain, but logging in the mail server needs a user id that can't be derived from the email address without an LDAP search.

We could do automatic configuration for users with a simple static autoconfiguration XML file, if there was one more placeholder available in the XML file format (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:ConfigFileFormat#Placeholders) 

So: I'm proposing a new placeholder called %ACCOUNTNAME% (or whatever you want to name it) that contains the name of the account that is running the Thunderbird process. 

We use the same account ID's for logging on the desktop and to the mail server, so this would make deployment very easy, and would eliminate the need for an autoconfig web server, for which we may not get have resources to maintain.

Conversation that lead to this idea can be found in mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird in the thread "Re: TB 2.0.0.24 last Tb 2.0. Sure thing, or just "not planned to upgrade"?". At least one other university has the same situation.


Reproducible: Always

	Ben Bucksch (:BenB)
	Comment 1 • 14 years ago

Using the OS username is a nice idea, but has two conceptual problems:

1) It's not based on the email address entered at all, so associated with that only via real-life factors, which may change. Let's say a user has 2 login accounts at your organization, for whatever reason. Surely, he'll want to check mail for both. The wizard will prefill the wrong value. Luckily, the problem is - assuming good UI - hopefully noticable and obvious to fix: Click [Manual config], change this one value (given the prefilled value as example, the correct value is now obvious), [Create Account].

2) It does nothing to help users who want to check mail from home. I assume that is very common. (Yes, they could check at the office which values TB uses, but that already requires some skill that most users lack. The whole idea is to make things very easy for everybody.)

Also, we have to be mindful of privacy issues, to not not leak OS usernames to the network unless it's really needed. So, we'd probably only support this placeholder in config files on harddisk (installation folder), not from autoconfig servers / ISPDB. That in turn complicates the code a little bit, but it's doable.

	jaakko.luoto Reporter
	Comment 2 • 14 years ago

(In reply to comment #1)

Good points on security issues, I agree that that this option is not needed for autoconfig server use. But for using the XML in installation folder this functionality would help a lot.

	Ben Bucksch (:BenB)
	Comment 3 • 14 years ago

Implementation: see nsIUserInfo.

|nsIUserInfo.username| looks like it's implemented on Linux, Mac and Win32, albeit on Windows of course with a different username style.

xref bug 29593.