Thunderbird 91: system mail support removed, account deleted

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mike155 · Post by **mike155** » Thu Nov 04, 2021 3:38 am

I installed Thunderbird 91.3 tonight. It works pretty well and I was finally able to uninstall GTK2.

Unfortunately, one of my two mail accounts didn't survive the migration. My mail account for system mail (movemail) was deleted!

It seems that Thunderbird 91.3 can't read mails from local directories!

There's an entry in the release notes:

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CHANGES: Movemail support removed

I've found a number of bugs in Mozilla's bug database:

Does anyone know a workaround?

Post by **toralf** » Wed Nov 17, 2021 12:26 pm

I do use postfix and mbox for local system account - same picture :-/

Do I have to install xbiff ?

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Thu Nov 18, 2021 5:11 am

May be time to convert. Thunderbird/postfix/fetchmail/maildir works as expected.

mike155 · Post by **mike155** » Thu Nov 18, 2021 7:53 pm

I have found a partial solution - a workaround. It's not perfect, but it works.

On my machine, local email is delivered to ~/.localmail. /var/spool/mail/<myname> is a link to ~/.localmail.

In Thunderbird 78, I had an account that fetched data from ~/.localmail. This doesn't work anymore in Thunderbird 91, since Thunderbird dropped support for movemail.

I followed the suggestion given in comment #35 of this thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1625741. I added a Link to the data directory of my regular Thunderbird account to ~/.localmail:

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cd ~/.thunderbird/8eda639c.default/Mail/<myaccount>
ln -s ~/.localdir LocalMail

Result: in Thunderbird, there's a new folder "LocalMail" which allows me to read and manage incoming local emails. I cannot send local emails - but that's no problem, because I'm mostly interested in receiving system emails from cron, smartmontools, etc.

nick_gentoo · Post by **nick_gentoo** » Fri Dec 03, 2021 9:30 pm

I am also using the postfix + thunderbird combination, but did not upgrade yet to thunderbird 91.
Now, I don't even remember how exactly I set it up this way, probably with the help of some web page a long time ago. But today, most instructions I find are about using thunderbird with a movemail account.

So, I'm not sure, how does one usually read local email? (preferably with >=thunderbird-91.0)
I started looking at fetchmail mentioned by figueroa, but it's not yet clear how to use it

mike155, you say that workaround is only a partial solution, so is there something that does not work the same way as before, with the older thunderbird?

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Sat Dec 04, 2021 4:56 am

For nearly 20 years or so, I've been using the postfix aliases to send local system mail off the system, then use fetchmail on my server to retrieve that mail with pop3. On the same machine I run an IMAP server with courier-imap so I can read that local system mail from several machine along with my personal mail with ordinary IMAP mail clients like Thunderbird (anywhere) and Mutt (on the server). I use procmail to sort incoming mail into logical categories so all system mail, such as cron job output, goes into a directory (directories) for that purpose while ordinary personal mail goes into the normal Inbox, all using a modern /home/USER/.maildir mailbox on the server.

This server is also running spamassassin and clamav all invoked with procmail as mail arrives. User assembly required. It took quite a bit of time to get this right. About 15-16 years ago I followed a posting in these forums that had step-by-step directions. I think this may be it:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=56633

nick_gentoo · Post by **nick_gentoo** » Sun Dec 05, 2021 7:10 pm

Thank you, figueroa, you sent me in the right direction.
I do not need (for now, at least) something that complex for sending email within a full network. But I found out that postfix can deliver itself the mail to any local mailbox. Then a small IMAP server is needed, that Thunderbird or any other mail client can talk to.

Joseph_sys · Post by **Joseph_sys** » Fri Dec 31, 2021 7:16 pm

Creating simlink does not work correctly.

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ln -s /var/mail/[user] /home/joseph/.thunderbird/bwesevlqn5.default/Mail/Local\ Folders/

When I restart Thunderbird, the local mail appears and I can delete it in Thunderbird
But the mail is not being removed from file: /var/mail/[user] even though permission is correct:

-rw------- 1 [user] mail 12K Dec 31 02:08 /var/mail/[user]