Sign in window flashes briefly before closing when adding account in Thunderbird + Owl

[vladsocaciu]

Steps to reproduce

• In a freshly installed Thunderbird, click the burger menu (top right) » Account settings » + New Account » Mail Account
• Fill in a valid Outlook 365 name & email
• Choose the 4th option. This uses paid extension Owl, which is important because it allows Outlook calendar to also be synced seamlessly.
• Observe how the sign in window flashes briefly, then disappears.

Notably, setting up IMAP (1st option in screen grab) will similarly bring up a sign in window, but that stays on.

[systeminfo.txt](https://github.com/user-attachments/files/22864601/systeminfo.txt)

[vladsocaciu]

I worked around this by installing another window manager for the email setup.

For others looking for a solution: Owl support suggested simply forcing Xwayland when starting Thunderbird, at least for initial setup.
$ env GDK_BACKEND=x11 MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0 thunderbird

[corigne]

Is there a bug registered with OWL maintainers that we can link here?
This information is useful but it would be nice to track the fix.

[vladsocaciu]

Not afaik

[nlbadia]

Just wanted to contribute since this issue eventually helped me solve this problem on Hyprland w/ Omarchy. I used xorg-server-xephyr and then opened Thunderbird using Xephyr with a command like this:

Xephyr :2 -screen 1200x900 &
DISPLAY=:2 GDK_BACKEND=x11 MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0 thunderbird

This allowed me to log in and then use Thunderbird normally.
Thank you for sharing your solution as well. The temporary environment variable didn't work for me for whatever reason, but it was a good start to eventually getting there.

[vladsocaciu]

TBH I haven't tried their suggestion. By the time I got it, I had already worked around the issue by installing river window manager and launching ThunderBird in there. Their suggestion seemed logical and straightforward, so I posted it here.