Enabling movemail on the Mac?

Tesseract · Post by **Tesseract** » August 19th, 2007, 6:54 pm

I've been putting off upgrading to Thunderbird 2.0 because it doesn't have movemail support on the Mac. But now I see that 1.5 is EOL, so I'll probably want to switch for security reasons. The rationale for removing movemail was that the few people who use it would know how to enable it, but that's certainly not the case for me.

So, can anyone tell me exactly how I could go about upgrading to TB 2.0 and continue to use my movemail account?

Tesseract · Post by **Tesseract** » August 21st, 2007, 4:57 am

Anyone?

Post by **rsx11m** » August 21st, 2007, 6:15 am

Neither using a Mac nor movemail myself, but due to the lack of responses I'll give it a try. Found this, maybe it helps...

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_2.0_installation_issues wrote:Movemail support has been removed for OSX. The assumption appears to be that if you could configure a movemail account you can create a movemail.rdf file. See this article on ISP hooks.

Tesseract · Post by **Tesseract** » August 21st, 2007, 6:32 am

Thanks for the link. It led me to this, which I assume is the RDF file that is shipped in the Linux builds. AFAICT it should go in Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/isp/. But even with it there, I don't see my movemail account in 2.0.

Post by **rsx11m** » August 21st, 2007, 6:48 am

Well, this looks rather cryptic. If I understand the instructions correctly, it should work the way you describe and you don't need to phrase it as an extension. Now, that's just the configuration side on Thunderbird, maybe there is something else missing that you would need to effectively "run" movemail? No idea ...

Tesseract · Post by **Tesseract** » August 23rd, 2007, 7:18 am

I built Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 from source, but with the change in bug 365879 reversed. This custom built TBird does correctly recognise my movemail account. The official build with movemail.rdf installed in the correct place does not.

This leads me to conclude that, rather than simply hiding movemail functionality in Mac builds, the patch in bug 365879 made it impossible to use movemail on the Mac at all. I'll reopen the bug and add a comment to that effect.

Post by **rsx11m** » August 23rd, 2007, 7:56 am

Good detective work! Yes, sometimes things are fixed that break it for somebody else...