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 Icedove for Debian ------------------ Icedove is the Thunderbird email client from Mozilla rebranded by Debian. Mozilla has changed the kind of developing and managing Thunderbird and make an announcement about this on July 8 2012. Since this announcement Mozilla decided to change the focus of there own software development and will put more action on important web projects and of course on FirefoxOS. Mozilla plans to open the Thunderbird development to a more community driven project but will also be there for security and stability maintenance. There are no plans to close the packaging of Icedove from the Debian side, but the future will see where the upstream project will go to. As long as Mozilla will provide ESR versions there will be packaged versions of those inside the various release of Debian. -- Carsten Schoenert Sun, 2 July 2013 21:32:07 +0100 Downgrading TLS security ------------------------ If your provider doesn't support TLS 1.2 and you can't make him upgrade you can change: "security.tls.version.min" and/or "security.tls.version.max" in about:config (available via "Edit ->> + Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor"). For details see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Security.tls.version.* . Note that changing these values decreases your transport level security. For more details see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/NSS https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480514 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Security_Services http://kb.mozillazine.org/Connection_errors_-_SMTP https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=761245 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-downgrade-scsv-00 -- Carsten Schoenert Wed, 15 Oct 2014 18:38:00 +0200 Adjusting TLS fallback strategy ------------------------------- Mozilla introduced a new setting with version 34.0b1: "security.tls.version.fallback-limit" The recommended (and default) value currently is: 3 (since 38.0b2) This means Thunderbird is doing no fall back from TLS 1.2 to 1.1 or to 1.0 at all if the server is requesting this. A value of '2' would mean Thunderbird is only using TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.1 as fall back. And with a value of '1' Thunderbird would do a fall back down to TLS 1.0 if needed. A fall back to SSLv2/v3 isn't supported. Technical details can be found on: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1093724 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1084025 Reactivateing SSLV3 connectivity -------------------------------- Due to POODLE and BEAST SSLv3 encrypted connections are not considered secure anymore. See [1], [2] and [3] for details. If you need to reactivate SSLv3 to use Thunderbird against legacy systems you have to change the settings for "security.tls.version.min" and set the value to '0'. This setting can be found in the about:config summary. (available via "Edit ->> + Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor"). For details see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Security.tls.version.* as written above. Please read also: [1] http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2011-3389 [2] https://www.openssl.org/~bodo/ssl-poodle.pdf [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2014/10/14/the-poodle-attack-and-the-end-of-ssl-3-0/ -- Carsten Schoenert Wed, 04 Sep 2017 18:11:00 +0100 Plugins and Icedove settings ---------------------------- There are at least one known plugin that conflict with the change of the security settings from above. The user Brent S. Elmer has reported that the plugin 'HTTPS Everywhere' from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is blocking a permanent change of the setting "security.tls.version.min". Note that this behavior is no Debian related issue. Please report other plugins and extensions that doesn't work well with the security settings. [1] https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=774790 -- Carsten Schoenert Sun, 18 Jan 2015 9:34:00 +0100 New and Changed Features with Icedove version 38.x and above ------------------------------------------------------------ At the Thunderbird Summit 2014 in Toronto [1] the contributors and developers for Thunderbird decided to focus their work on some important changes that now released with version 38.0.1. For Icedove these changes means in detail: * New storage backend maildir You can now choose as backend while set up a new account to store the emails in a maildir [2] backend. There is no migration from existing accounts into the maildir backend format available! You have to set up a new account for that and move your mails! * Removing the 4GB folder maximum In previous versions you couldn't use more than 4GB within one folder in your INBOX, now this limit isn't exist any longer. * Searching contacts across all address books The address book now contains a folder "All Address Books" from there you can search for any address in all of your local or remote address books. * Support OAuth backend for new created GMail accounts You are now able to use the OAuth authentication while you create a new account for a GMail address. Existing accounts can be changed to use OAuth. * Opt out automatic installation of Lightning Mozilla has changed the installation mechanism for Lightning away from a always manually installation to a automatic installation with a option to opt out this while the main installation of Thunderbird. Debian is handling this slightly different as we use a package management for such automatism. On a Debian system the package iceowl-extensiom (the rebranded Lightning package from Mozilla) will now installed automatically if you install or upgrade the Icedove package through the package manager you prefer. If you already have installed the Lightning package Icedove will use this AddOn like before the upgrade. But we recommend to not use the Lightning AddOn to work always with full compatible program packages. So please remove the Lightning plugin and use the iceowl-extension instead. No data will be lost! [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Summit_2014 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir -- Carsten Schoenert Sun, 14 Jun 2015 13:13:00 +0200