Dear Maintainer,

When adding an account, if I get comething wrong I'm left guessing what's
wrong and wasting time diagnosing the wrong thing:

'Icedove failed to find the seccings for your email account' doesn't tell me
if it's my usersname or password that's wrong, or do I have something
wronte with my IMAP, or is it with the SMTP?  Which setting am I supposed
to change?  I would save time if it said something more useful such as
'IMAP works, but can't authenticate via SMTP though I can connect'.

Hello Nigel,

unfortunately you are right. There are several issues like this inside Icedove
(and also Thunderbird) since a long time. Look at some old entries in the BTS.

We from the packaging side can't do any useful here, we are unable to do
improvements on the source code too. So this is really a problem on upstream.
But as Mozilla decided to put Thunderbird more into a opensource community
project there is less attention than on Firefox on Thunderbird. As I understand
it correct on the Fosdem this year there are only five persons left from
Mozilla who working regular on Thunderbird. And they do mostly code clean up
und keep the core in sync with Firefox (like libxul.so).

So there is a poor situation, Mozilla won't and can't do much about such
issues. But they are open to patches, it's up to the community to improve the
situation.
Care to create a new bugzilla entry on Mozilla or better search first if there
is something similar already opened up. Whatever, we need the upstream bug url
to keep a tracking forwarded to the upstream bug.

Thanks and Regards
Carsten