Logging the new account wizard

 While most folks will never have an issue with setting up an account,  there are however  those that for inexplicable reasons find that the process fails and the message they receive as to why is less than helpful.  Offering support to those people is difficult to say the least,  however having access to a complete log makes it much simpler.

How to actually capture a log of what happened in the account setup process. I have never seen it mentioned outside the Bugzilla bug management system. 

So here goes my attempt to document these things.

First you need to change some hidden preferences in Thunderbird to get a complete log.  So go to the config editor and make the following preference changes.

mail.wizard.logging.dump to all
mail.wizard.logging.console to all

Now access the error console (ctrl+Shift+J) or via the developer tools on the tool menu and clear it by clicking the trash bin icon


Once you have done the setup you can now attempt to set up your mail account and the entire operation will be logged to the console.

 

Once you have the output,  right click in the console and select export all messages to a file.

Once done with the logging change the preferences back to default as writing to the log is a somewhat expensive process and could slow Thunderbird at critical times.