First we would like to remind the reader what ranting is about. As AI put it: Online, it signals exactly what you’re doing: calling out mistakes, bad decisions, sloppy work, or irritating trends — but in a way that’s more commentary-with-attitude than theatrical shouting.
So here goes a personal story from your favourite CEO:
I had a bad Sunday. In the morning, I was writing an e-mail and was hit by three bugs.
First, searching by custom header had been messed up since the preference mailnews.customHeaders which lists custom headers had been corrupted, likely by an add-on, since the code just doesn't do that. The separator :<space> had been replaced by \n. Very weird.
Next, I noticed that in an new composition with many attachments shown on top (which is a Betterbird feature), the header pane grew with no way to reduce it. That was actually a real bug. It got fixed in our "latest build 4".
And finally, the ghost menus hit me. A user had reported them before, but only today I found a reproducible case. After a long investigation it turned out that setting preference ui.prefersReducedMotion to the default value 0 caused this issue. Betterbird exposes the preference, hence it leads to this error. Thunderbird 140 fails the same way if one sets the preference manually. The issue seems to be fixed in later versions of Thunderbird. We haven't bisected where it got fixed.
And to add insult to injury, I noticed that Thunderbird 146 makes irreversible changes to a profile, so while switching versions, at some stage I was prompted to enter all the passwords again. That's where a backup came in handy.
But hey, there was a silver lining: A user wrote: YOU ARE MY HERO!!!!! after helping him diagnose that his mail provider was rejecting his SMTP EHLO command based on his local IP address of 192.168.1.13. BTW, AI predicted something like that based on the obscure error received: internal error AUP#EML-005. So if your mail provider plays up, you can set preference mail.smtpserver.smtpXX.hello_argument to work around it. The XX can be obtained from the account listing in the Troubleshooting Information (that's a Betterbird-only feature).
Oh yeah, SuperSandro from NixOS helped us with improving our build script by replacing uname -i with uname -m. Two workarounds for uname -i not working on Debian and macOS were made obsolete.
How was your Sunday?