🤺 Send Later add-on vs. Drafts folder

[carpincho]

In short: I have stumbled upon an issue with Send Later add-on. Its documentation did not help, so I emailed the author, but his answer was unexpectedly ungracious. I have found a workaround and I want to share my experience with those who may encounter similar problems.

In details:

I was using Thunderbird 52.8.0 (initially with Russian interface) on a Windows 10 PC, and an email account provided by Yandex (a Russian company). I have installed Send Later add-on (6.3.8), and right away error messages began raining every single minute:

I have read the docs supposedly describing a fix for this issue, and fulfilled all the steps as written. But nothing has changed, and the errors continued to jump out.

I have sent an email to the author of the add-on, with a detailed description and screenshots of my issue. However the author has answered in a surprisingly rough manner:

The documentation in the user guide is the correct way to fix this issue.
If those instructions do not resolve the issue for you, then I don’t know what to tell you.

I find it difficult to construe author’s rigidity; anyhow, I had to invent a solution on my own. First, I have noticed that the name of my drafts folder was not “Drafts”, but the same word in Russian, and Yandex mail server did not allow for renaming it to “Drafts” or creating a new folder with this name:

So that is what I did:

1. In the Web settings of my email account, I have changed the language to English. After this, IMAP folders got English names (imap://login%40domain.ru@imap.yandex.com/Drafts instead of imap://login%40domain.ru@imap.yandex.com/%D0%A7%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8).

2. I have deleted my account in Thunderbird (all email was remaining on the server).

3. I have changed Thunderbird language to English.

4. I have re-created mail account in Thunderbird. Now all folders have received names in English, and the issue was gone. No more popping-out error messages, and Send Later add-on is working as expected.

I am not sure all these steps were necessary for the result, and I am going to continue experimenting in search for a way to make the add-on working without abandoning my native language.

My hypothesis is that somewhere deep in the add-on, an assumption is applied that the drafts folder’s name must be literally “Drafts”, and no other form is allowed. I have not yet gained an understanding of whether this language constraint applies to folder names on the server, in Thunderbird, or both.

[Jonathan_Kamens]

My hypothesis is that somewhere deep in the add-on, an assumption is applied that the drafts folder’s name must be literally “Drafts”, and no other form is allowed.

Your hypothesis is incorrect.

The paths of all of the Drafts folders accessed by Send Later are read from Thunderbird’s preferences.

My understanding is that when Thunderbird creates a Drafts folder itself, it uses the name “Drafts” for creating Drafts folders on the IMAP server, even if the displayed name of the folder is different in different locales. My best guess is that you had a drafts folder created before you started using Thunderbird, so it was created on the server with a name other than “Drafts”. Normally that would work just fine in Send Later, but it is possible that if the folder name on the server had UTF-8 characters in it, that would have caused Send Later to malfunction.

I don’t know how nobody could have run into this problem before now, but I will investigate further when I have the time to see if I can reproduce this issue, and if so see if I can come up with a fix.

I am glad you were able to solve the problem. I am sorry I was not able to be more helpful in response to your original email; as I said that, I didn’t have any other ideas at the time. If I’d had any other ideas or suggestions, I would have given them.