WebExtension AddOn interface in Thunderbird >= 68.0 --------------------------------------------------- Starting with version 68.0 the only supported interface for Add-ons is the WebExtension interface. No old XUL-based, sometimes called legacy Add-ons will work anymore. Starting with 78.0 also no legacy WebExtensions will not work any more. This sentence is not only true for Debian packaged extensions but also for previously pulled Add-ons from addons.thunderbird.net or some other external resources. If you encounter any incompatible packaged Add-ons please open a bug report for the package, if not already a bug report is created. If you are developing own WebExtension based Add-ons you might help to migrate other still not ready to use Add-ons. Help is really appreciated in any way. The API documentation of WebExtension can be found here. https://thunderbird-webextensions.readthedocs.io/en/68 Some guideline how to migrate to WebExtension from a Legacy Add-on you will find here. https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/tb68 Christopher Leidigh (a full-time Thunderbird contributor) has collected a list of available Add-ons and their status. So you might find his list useful. https://cleidigh.github.io/ThunderKdB/index.html OpenPGP support within Thunderbird >= 78.0 ------------------------------------------ By dropping even support of the legacy WebExtension API in 78.x the typical used Add-on Enigmail for GPG encryption would not fully working any more. This is basically grounded on limitations of the WebExtension API to restrict full access on file system level. The developer ob Enigmail and MZLNA decided to include OpenPGP support within Thunderbird directly starting with Thunderbird 78.0. But this now included native OpenPGP support has some downside, Thunderbird is using it's own key storage system within the users profile. This means, OpenPGG is working independently of installed GPG related packages! Also no automatically sync between Thunderbird and $(HOME)/.gnupg will happen! Migration from Enigmail to native OpenPGP support: This step is optional but user are encouraged to use the migration wizard of Enigmail. The Enigmail developer did create a final Enigmail version 2.2.x which is helping to migrate from the old Enigmail supported workflow over to the OpenPGP included support. To use this migration wizard you will need to install Enigmail >= 2.2 as Debian package (if available) or install this extension by using the menu 'Tools' -> 'Add-ons' and search for it. There will be a pop up window directly after the installation which is asking the user if he wanted to be guided through the GPG migration. The user can also start the migration wizard later at any time by calling it from the 'Tool' menu the entry 'Migrate Enigmail Settings'. You can found more information about the OpenPGP support on the following web resources. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:2020 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Status https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/78.0/releasenotes/ https://www.enigmail.net/index.php/en/home/news https://addons.thunderbird.net/en/thunderbird/addon/enigmail/ -- Carsten Schoenert Sun, 20 Oct 2020 9:05:00 +0200 De-Branding of Icedove, Reintroduce Thunderbird in Debian --------------------------------------------------------- Debian and Mozilla has done some new rethinking and talking about the old legal questions about trademark issues [1]. Based on this revaluation the Debian project got now an agreement from Mozilla Corp. that the rebranded packages Iceweasel, Debian rebranded version for Firefox, and Icedove, Debian rebranded version for Thunderbird are no longer needed. The maintainers of the Iceweasel package followed that agreement and did a de-branding of Iceweasel back to Firefox. More information on this process can be found on [1]. For Icedove the maintainers followed too the new agreement and remove the old branding after almost 10 years for Icedove and Iceowl-Extension and switched back to the official branding from Mozilla. The according bug for this process can be found under [2]. For versions greater 1:45.6.0-2 the following packages were introduced as a replacement. old package .... --> new package usage --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- icedove ........ --> thunderbird (Thunderbird Main application) icedove-dev .... --> thunderbird-dev (Thunderbird Development files) icedove-dbg .... --> thunderbird-dbg (Thunderbird with debugging symbols) iceowl-extension --> lightning (Lightning, aka Calendar for Thunderbird) icedove-l10n-* . --> thunderbird-l10n-* (l10n localization for Thunderbird) iceowl-l10n-* .. --> lightning-l10n-* (l10n localization for Lightning) The old packages were changed to transitional packages and can be safely removed after the automatically installation of the new packages. = Profile Migration = ===================== Due the removing of the rebranding for Icedove Thunderbird will use the default profile folder $HOME/.thunderbird for storing all the various user related stuff! With the new Thunderbird packages there is a wrapper script included, placed as /usr/bin/thunderbird that will do a adoption of the existing profile folder $HOME/.icedove into the new default folder for the user profile $HOME/.thunderbird by setting up a symlink to the existing profile if possible. The automatism in the script will check the following parts: 1. Check if there is a folder or a symbolic link $HOME/.icedove existing and there is NO folder or symbolic link $HOME/.thunderbird. 2. Create a symlink from $HOME/.thunderbird to $HOME/.icedove . 3. Fixing Mime type registration for' http(s)' and 'file' inside mimeTypes.rdf if they registered for iceweasel. Before starting the fixup a backup will be created name $FILE.backup_thunderbird_migration-${DATE}. 4. Also check for desktop type registrations of 'userapp-icedove*.desktop' in '$HOME/.config/mimeapps.list' and $HOME/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list, but only if this file exists, users of tiling window managers won't have this file. Read further for more information on this. Like above, a backup of the existing file with same schema will be created if needed. 7. If all was going well, starting Thunderbird. 8. If there is no folder $HOME/.icedove or $HOME/.thunderbird exists the wrapper script will start Thunderbird without any extra action. 9. The above steps from 3.) will be also done if you already have a symlink $HOME/.thunderbird that is pointing to $HOME/.icedove or the opposite, $HOME/.thunderbird is pointing to $HOME/.icedove. So if you don't have one of the following four cases the wrapper script will exit with a error message. 1. $HOME/.icedove is existing and holds valid profile data 2. $HOME/.thunderbird points to $HOME/.icedove and 1. is true 3. $HOME/.icedove points to $HOME/.thunderbird and 1. is true 4. $HOME/.thunderbird is existing and holds valid profile data (Note: Not the script, but Thunderbird will error out here if no profiles are found!) If there is anything going wrong there will be splash screens displayed with some additional notes, the logger mechanism will write some information about what's going wrong into /var/log/syslog. So don't panic if there is something not working automatically. If the starter script can't do the adoptions you will need to look by yourself and solve the situation. Mostly there can be already a folder or symlink $HOME/.thunderbird that prevents a automatic migration by the script. In such a case save a existing folder $HOME/.thunderbird else where if needed and restart the Thunderbird application. Other things like extra special mountpoints by the system administrator can't also be handled by the script. Please ask the service desk if you have trouble then. What else can you do? You can call '/usr/bin/thunderbird --verbose' from a command line to see a verbose output of the wrapper script. For more options of the wrapper script and how to use them call '/usr/bin/thunderbird --help'. The Debian wiki is holding also extra information about the migration of Icedove to Thunderbird. https://wiki.debian.org/Thunderbird For backward compatibility whithin the Stretch release there will be that migration functionality until the release of Buster (aka Debian 10). Afterwards you can still do this on your on by moving the folders manually. = Avoid the pop-up information about migration globally = ========================================================= Within some use cases (e.g. bigger company environments) it can sometimes not be useful that a user will see the dialogue window about the profile migration as this can be more confusing than helpful. To avoid this dialogue for all users on the system the administrator can create a file '/etc/thunderbird/no_migration_popup' and the starting wrapper will not pop-up the information dialogue if the migration isn't already done. = User specific MIME Associations = =================================== The desktop environment (usually Gnome, KDE, Mate etc.) is holding the specific associations between MIME types and applications in various places. In order the user can override system settings and adding new ones the according place in the users home is the file '$(HOME)/.config/mimeapps.list'. The migration is taking care for old 'icedove.desktop' associations and is rewriting them to 'thunderbird.desktop'. Like already done for the user profile, there will be always a backup of the existing file created before the replacement can be done. In case of problems you can safely move back to the original file. You will lost then the needed association for the thunderbird binary. You can call '/usr/bin/thunderbird --show-backup' to see created backups from the various possible modified files while the profile adoption. See also: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mime-apps-spec/mime-apps-spec-1.0.html = Migration of global configurations = ====================================== If you have some own special preferences files placed in '/etc/icedove/pref/' they will be moved to '/etc/thunderbird/pref/'. In case you have a modified file '/etc/icedove/pref/icedove.js' it will be moved to '/etc/thunderbird/pref/icedove.js.dpkg-backup' to keep your changes. Please adjust this file to the Thunderbird specific configuration file '/etc/thunderbird/pref/thunderbird.js'. The old folder '/etc/icedove' is gone be removed only if it is completely empty. There are still some corner cases where this automatism with configuration files in /etc/thunderbird/pref is not fully working. Please note #806955 [4] about such issues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006 [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=816679 [4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=806955 -- Carsten Schoenert Sun, 21 Aug 2016 10:12:00 +0200 Mozilla Crash Reporter for Thunderbird -------------------------------------- The crash reporter for Thunderbird is enabled since version > 1:45.6.0-3. By this a possible crash could be automatically send to Mozilla if the user is accepting this. There is nothing send to Mozilla without a user action. More information about the crash reporter can be found on: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-crash-reporter-tb Please consider to use the crash reporter for getting crashes reported upstream, this also helps the maintainers if Thunderbird to get crash reports send upstream. Submitted crash reports can be found, if any was send, in ~/.thunderbird/Crash Reports/submitted/ -- Carsten Schoenert Sun, 29 Jan 2017 14:15:00 +0100