Thunderbird 2 error's

I use RPC Emu with Risc OS 5.28 and have installed Thunderbird 2 and get the follwing error’s:

Could not initialize the browsers security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your browsers profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the browser and fix the problem. If you continue to use this browser session, you might see incorrect browser behaviour when accessing security features.

Mail can’t connect securely to pop.gmx.net because the SSL protocol has been disabled.

I did not disable the SSL protocol.

Micky

I think you’ll find that it’s a very old version of Thunderbird, and work on it ceased many years ago.

Are you sure the SSL message isn’t caused by the server disabling it?

Most sensible servers block SSL in favour of TLS these days, if Thunderbird is sufficiently ancient it might only be doing SSL.

Someone has gone to the effort of integrating TLS1.2 support with TB2 over at https://github.com/Kukunin/thunderbird2-tls12

Might be an ‘interesting’ project for someone to bring that over?

When that version of Thunderbird was ported the regularly used encryption on connections was SSL3 – deprecated in 2015 Just skim the Wikipedia page
As James notes, most services no longer support use of the deprecated protocols.

The message is telling you that the attempt to use the SSL/TLS version you have has failed.

Given the age of that software, it almost certainly expects SSLv3 or TLS1.0 level connections.
The server is expecting clients to use POP3S on port 995 and only offers connectivity with a specific set of cyphers associated with TLS1.2 and TLS1.3

PORT STATE SERVICE
995/tcp open pop3s
| ssl-enum-ciphers:
| TLSv1.2:
| ciphers:
| TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA (rsa 2048) – A
| TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 (rsa 2048) – A
| TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CCM (rsa 2048) – A
| TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (rsa 2048) – A
| TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (rsa 2048) – A
| TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256 (rsa 2048) – A
| TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CCM (rsa 2048) – A
| TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (rsa 2048) – A
| compressors:
| NULL
| cipher preference: client
| TLSv1.3:
| ciphers:
| TLS_AKE_WITH_AES_128_CCM_SHA256 (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_AKE_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_AKE_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (secp256r1) – A
| TLS_AKE_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 (secp256r1) – A
| cipher preference: client
|_ least strength: A

Connections on the older (plain POP3) port of tcp 110 show identical results.

In short, unless your software does a minimum of TLS1.2, with one of the listed cyphers, you can not connect.

Odd – out of curiosity I did look at that github site being a bit surprised about TLS 1.2, aka an outdated TLS – but no surprise considering the age of the github entries there. Though I have admit that for RISC OS thanks to having chosen mbedTLS for us TLS 1.2 is kind of “cutting edge” (with some hope that this will change in near future since TLS 1.3 is being worked on for mbedTLS).

The odd email provider does by now refuse anything below TLS 1.1 or even 1.2 – though quite a few cheaper ones accept even unTLSsed connections or SSL simply since they do not want to hassle with customers using outdated or old software, or would need quite a abit help to set things up or fix an outdated setup.

But for email the only kind of historic email app I would dare to use is things like Pluto or Messenger Pro that simply due to lack of features are pretty immune against some of the threats since pure text tends to be rather passive so that automatisms inside HTML-mails simply are ignored.

So overall sure you could use that historic Thunderbird since most of the risks simply won’t be such on RISC OS due to the backend being one the malware is ignorant of … but if you are on RPCEmu and thus have an underlying OS that will run the current Thunderbird I dare ask, why not use that.

This is pitty. I have !Messenger but I don’t like this email program. I have Seamonkey for Windows since 20 years. Seamonkey is like Firefox and Thunderbird in one suite.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org

It is very easy to port the email datas to another Seamonkey. Seamonkey for Linux or Seamonkey for eComStation, now ArcaOS. Or to other Windows Seamonkey versions.

Micky