Comment 69 for bug 603402

(In reply to WADA from comment #32)
> All "comuication between IMAP cliet(Thunderbird) and IMAP server" is done by
> "IMAP command and responce". How can software developers know "what actually
> happens in your environment" without required data?

Any developper can repro the bug easily: create a Gmail account (they are now free, and don't need sponsorship anymore; beta have been close, and official product have been launched years ago), configure two different Thunderbird profiles to access the same Gmail account, send one email from one box to the other one, read the mail on both, mark the mail as unread on one, and click GET MAIL on the other one, you will see that email is marked unread only after restarting "the other one".

You don't need huge amount of data from users, strace or backtraces. Any dev can produce desired amount of logs for free, any time, and from any country (yes ... I had country specific issues with Google in the past - this bug is NOT one of them). To dig deeply into client-server communication, tcpdump often helps.

Thunderbird is a free software. And dev always remind users that they are volunteers. But the products of the Mozilla fundations have a reputation to defend; they slowly became popular, and are now used by many people ... not only geeks in the cave using Linux for religious reasons; Thunderbird is used by people why have serious work, and who consider Thunderbird as a work tool. This means ... the tool must meet minimal requirements, and must work at least, as good as other concurrent products. And since mid 2013, thunderbird have serious issues. It does not sync properly messages status, and does not work at all anymore with Google Calendar (yes I know, it's not Mozilla Fundation who was responsible for Google Calendar Exchange server shut down; but the moz team could have worked on making TB compatible with an other protocol). Now, TB have become a poor mail reader not even able to track a READ STATUS, I can not use PGP encryption at all (since TB3, or maybe even TB2, I forgot), and it can not let me use my calendar any more. I wonder why I have not yet changed MUA.

Dev always claim that ... they work for free, and are free to choose what to work on, which snipset of code they want to have fun with. By letting users down on basic features, users will get bored of the product. This bug is one of the few that I consider critical and urgent. Last week I was trying to configure an old Nokia Symbian S60 for Gmail sync; in my research, I have found several articles saying that Gmail closed the Exchange access, and that Mail for Exchange for Symbian is now deprecated because of Google choices; the articles was also doing an overview of other affected products; MFE@Symbian was considered as a small loss, because Nokia themselves left down Symbian, and they officially stopped supporting Symbian S60 phones. The article also mentionned that Thunderbird was also affected, and that is was a shame for such a populat product to not publish a serious work around within days. A WA should have been proposed in days; it's now one year, and TB still does not compensate the loss; any mobile phone (included Linux based Android) now use either push, or similar tech; thunderbird ... does not.

That's why, for some key features that Thunderbird does not implement (used to in previous versions, but does not any more), I am seriously considering to ... install a phone emulator ... to bring back these features in my desktop. Gonna use a foreign arch emulator to work around regressions of Thunderbird !!!

The best MUA ever was Thunderbird 1.5 .