thunderbird-60 address book broken
 

The address book in thunderbird-60.4 (from slackware64-current) displays, and can be used to send emails, but cannot be edited or new contacts added. The thunderbird-60.4 from slackware64-14.2 (same version, but package is slightly different) has the same breakage. The "OK" button for any of the address book subpanels appears active (not greyed out), but does nothing. The "birthday" field in the "private" subpanel displays strangely, and cannot be filled in. I reverted to thunderbird-45 from the original slackware64-14.2, and it works fine (and my address book was not damaged [whew!]).

I noticed changes in the address book from the mozilla website,but nothing was said about this level of backwards incompatibility. I don't really know at which version the breakage occurred since my address book is fairly static, but I suspect it was at -60.

Any ideas? I'll stay reverted until then.

Hello Rod,

I just tested adding a new entry in address book on 14.2/64 and current. I have Tbird 60.4 on both. I can add new entry and do not see the irregularities you have seen.

I have the Jan 26th updates on current. 14.2/64 is up to date as well.

Thanks camorri,

Your experience suggests that the issue might be with some of the Slackware packages that 60.4 uses, even though my system has all the latest upgrades for slackware64-current. Checked the dynamic libs for x86_64 Thunderbird and they are the same for both Thunderbird versions. Not clear if you are using Slackware64 or just Slackware. I use both on different machines, but not Thunderbird on the 32 bit machines. I'll try the "clean" update on one of the 32 bit machines and see what happens.
...
On my old 32 bit laptop running 14.2 with latest patches, 60.4 runs fine. I never used Thunderbird on that machine before, so I had to create a new account.
...
My current guess, since I've been running Thunderbird since forever and copying the .thunderbird directory over when I build a new system, is that there is something in my ".thunderbird" directory that 45 can handle, but 60 cannot. I will copy my "real" .thunderbird to the old 32 bit machine and see if the problem moves with it.

I have actual work to do, but I'll post later if I find out anything.

60.4 works fine on both 32 and 64 bit versions, using newly-created accounts. On my 32 bit machine I took the IMAP setup for it, and then replaced .thunderbird with the legacy .thunderbird directory from my 64 bit machine. It still worked fine, and I suspect the same trick would work on the 64 bit machine. But the 64 bit machine runs Postfix to communicate with my ISP, and there seems to be no way to interact with the local mail spool (e.g. no "Unix Movemail") in 60.4

I use "fetchmail" to get mail from my ISP to the 64 bit machine with the server, then can access it from the 32 bit machines. Outgoing goes to port 25 on my server, and Postfix fiddles sender names, etc., and sends it to the ISP.

So until I find a way to get movemail working, I'm stuck with -45. Anybody know when movemail went away???

Update: seamonkey-2.49 still supports movemail, and according to the seamonkey website, uses most of the thunderbird-52.9 codebase. The only catch is that the import from thunderbird feature doesn't do anything!
The seamonkey directory is in .mozilla/seamonkey. I manually copied the contents of the .thunderbird/*default/Mail folder into .mozilla/seamonkey/*default/Mail and copied abook.mab likewise. Didn't copy anything else, and seamonkey sees the mail and the address book, picks up local mail and I can edit the address book.

So I've lost whatever wondrous magic was added in later Thunderbirds, but it seems like Thunderbird is dying as far as Mozilla is concerned. And I don't have to worry about accidentally upgrading to a nonfunctional thunderbird with slackpkg!

That doesn't appear to be the case,

https://download.cnet.com/news/mozil...rades-in-2019/