User:Bienvenu/support extension ideas
Helping out each individual user on Get Satisfaction doesn't scale well. We'd like to have an extension that helps deals with the top few support issues, solving them if possible, giving more diagnostic information if not possible to solve. A lot of these are workarounds for bugs, but it could be easier to provide solutions in an extension initially.
Message send/receive issues - reprobe settings, username, etc, and verify that we can send and receive mail. Essentially, we would do a reprobe on an account the user was having trouble with (or all accounts) and try to repair the account. This could also help when the ISP has changed the server settings.
Profile discovery/import. We've seen several users who have lost track of where their mail is stored, for one reason or an other. For example, they've changed the server directory, or the server directory has gotten corrupted. Or a user may want to move a profile from one machine to an other, or need to recover from backups. It's fairly straightforward for sophisticated users to move the appropriate files around, but it's daunting for normal users. There's also the bug where profiles.ini or prefs.js gets corrupted (especially on upgrade) so users start up and see the new account wizard. I'd like to see support for finding "lost" profiles and mail folders and offering to import them into an existing profile. (Moz backup and restore helps here, from what I understand...) This would be similar to what things like iTunes and iPhoto do on first run - find files that look like music or photos. We currently can't even import from an existing Thunderbird profile.
Easy way to clear the disk cache, and rebuild indexes/offline stores.
Turn on folder compaction, if not already turned on, and/or compact folders.
Check for virus checkers known to cause issues, especially ones that intercept the communication between Thunderbird and the mail server. Don't know how feasible this is.
Check for non-default settings the user may have accidentally toggled and gotten confused about - e.g., view | messages | unread only, view | threads | unread for inboxes or other folders, view | display attachments inline turned off, view | message body as | something other than original html. Check for collapsed folder pane...
Check for unusual slowness in various operations (opening a message, loading a folder) and try to diagnose (virus checker can slow down file i/o for large files, huge number of messages in imap folders or on pop3 server can slow things down, etc)
