You're right. There should be an easier way to do this. Looking at past
posts, I found a posting by Seth that outlined some other problems
associated with this. Reposting that mail below. Also as his mail
states, I was wrong in that you can't just change the server user pref.
There are a lot of other things to change too. I "think" though that if
you changed all occurrences of the server name and changed the name of
the directory, it'll work.
-Pratik.
Seth Spitzer wrote:
> Henrik,
>
>
>> You can do it by manually changing the info in the prefs.js file. It's
>> located in your mozilla profile directory.
>> Do a search on "prefs.js"
>
> Do you notice any problems after doing that? While I believe it too be possible to
>hand edit your prefs to rename an account, I don't recommend it.
>
> For example:
>
> Say I have an imap account on the server nsmail-1, username sspitzer.
>
> And I have my "sent folder" pref set to the "Sent" folder on that server.
>
> so in my prefs.js, I have something like:
>
> user_pref("mail.identity.id2.fcc_folder","imap://sspitzer@nsmail-1/Sent");
>
> If I go and hand edit my prefs to change from nsmail-1 to nsmail-2, bad thing will
>happen when I send email.
>
> I currently own the bug to all users to change the username or hostname from the
>account settings dialog. Coming up with a fix is going to be interesting and will
>require some thought and a whole lot of testing.
>
> editing the prefs file after you've quit the application avoids some of these
>problems, since there are no "live" objects with uri's that need to be changed.
>
> I've been thinking about having the uri's be
>
> scheme://<server key>/<folder path>
>
> instead of
>
> scheme://<username>@<hostname>/<folder path>
>
> since server key doesn't change and won't change if the hostname or username changes.
>
> We'll have to fix a bunch of code that used the uri to get the username or hostname
>(which is a good thing, since we might be parsing the uri to get that info, which is
>bad.) if we don't have the incoming server, we'll have to go through the account
>manager.
>
> we'll also have to migrate a lot of prefs, like the fcc_folder pref example above.
>
> As you can tell, I haven't really thought this all through.
>
> I've been focusing on performance problems and making sure patches from external
>contributors get checked into the tree in a timely fashion.
>
> If someone is interested in tackling this beast, add yourself to
>http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14295
>
> -Seth
Steve wrote:
> A more advanced user can hack the thing, but for most users, this isn't
> what comes to mind. Although you can do it this way or even just
> transferring your e-mail to the new account which isn't a big deal
> either, it's still a bit lame that users have to do this in the first
> place.
>
> Oh well.
>
> Steve
>
>
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Pratik Solanki
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> I've done this before. I had to change the POP server and I managed to
>> do it by changing the prefs.js file and the directory structure. The was
>> I did it then (about 3-4 months ago) was to change all places where
>> 'pop.oldserver' was written to 'pop.newserver' in the prefs.js file. I
>> then changed the name of the folder in Mail directory from pop.oldserver
>> to pop.newserver. That worked for me.
>>
>> Looking at the prefs.js file, I think you should be able to get away
>> with just changing the following line.
>>
>> user_pref("mail.server.serverx.hostname", "pop.oldserver");
>>
>> to
>>
>> user_pref("mail.server.serverx.hostname", "pop.newserver");
>>
>> - Pratik.
>>
>> DISCLAIMER - Not responsible if doing the above makes your account
>> unusable or deletes all your mails or crashes Mozilla, etc. etc.
>>
<snip>
