Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by ~dp on April 11, 2012 · permalink

At the core of it this is a lovely add-on if the finer details of mail server / client interaction have your attention. They do have mine and I would love to use this add-on.
However, there are some rough edges left and one of them is a show-stopper for me. This tracer somehow interferes with some http traffic.
This is from debian wheezy icedove 10.0.3.
issue 1: Add-ons manager "More"-button, intended to show more info to an add-on and basically opens a browser window. This browser gets no data when tbtrace is installed and active.
issue 2: probably the same thing but hurts me more. None of my google calendars can be reached while the tbtracer is installed. The error msg is: Warning: There has been an error reading data for calendar: blabla. However, this error is believed to be minor, so the program will attempt to continue. Error code: 0x804b0014. Description: null
this is a generic "didn't work" msg. It came up after I installed tbtacer, it didn't reappear after I removed the tbtracer. I really need my calendars working so this is a showstopper.
Another one of the rough edges is just an documentation issue and probably linux or *nix specific. It's about the env.vars and that friendly button on the preference pane which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to work for a linux user.
What happens after the button gets clicked? On my sys a file .bash_profile got created, 0755 and 2 lines of export. Now, the next time a bash shell is created for this user those two variables will be set and available in the environment. Only in new shells, not in those already existing!
So on linux you see the dialog report success, the interfaces asks you to restart thunderbird. You do, but after the restart nothing has changed. You would need to log out and restart your desktop environment to see those vars set, or do like a poster above recommends and restart thunderbird from a new shell , from the command line.
On my system there is also something between .profile and .bash_profile, .profile won't be read when -bash_profile exists. So, when a .bash_profile is added secretly we get some collateral damages as the stuff in the .profile file is secretly disabled. Nothing an editor couldn't fix but the user must be told about it.

I'll give it 3 stars from +5 for the thing itself but -2 stars for the side effects on my calendars and the profile file's content