So I had a crazy thing happen to me this weekend, and I was racking my brains trying to figure it out. I thought I’d share here for the benefit of future travellers, including myself. Perhaps there is a UX improvement suggestion in here too. I’ll also post this to the mailcow forum.
I used sync jobs to consolidate a bunch of mailboxes from another mail server into sub-mailboxes in my main account hosted on mailcow. In the end this worked out very well and I am super satisfied with the result. But not before some bizarre failed attempts! The problem is that the nextcloud passwords firefox extension was prefilling the username and password fields on the sync job setup page. I would put everything in correctly, but it would save with my mailcow account username and password instead, which happened to be the same as the username and password on the old server. Then when the sync ran it would sync a copy of my own mailbox into the sub-mailbox. Only when I deleted the extension did it save the username and password correctly.
Bizarre, right?
I am not sure what the fix is here but it could probably be done in mailcow by changing the username and password field labels on the sync setup page to something that doesn’t get picked up by the password manager.
In the meantime, if you run into this issue then the answer is to simply delete the extension and then reinstall it again after you are done configuring your sync jobs.
I don’t use Passwords myself, but rather Vaultwarden together with the Bitwarden browser extension. However, I’ve occasionally seen similar “weird” issues there as well on certain websites, where the browser extension’s autofill feature “hijacks” fields because it incorrectly assumes they are login fields that need credentials filled in automatically.
I’m not sure what options are available in the Passwords extension, but for me this mainly happened when the “Autofill on page load” feature in the Bitwarden browser extension was enabled. If a similar option exists in Passwords, you could try disabling it.
It seems that the extension is too over-eager there when filling in the credentials. My recommendation would be to go into the extension settings and under “Other Settings” add the mailcow domain to the ignored domains list in the “Pasting credentials”.
I’m not sure if the mailcow team can do anything about this
Thanks both! Those are good suggestions. I will see if having the passwords app not filling automatically will work for me - that is disabled by default as I learned just now reinstalling the extension. If not I can add mailcow domain to the ignored domains list.
Well if you want to update this, than not by changing some labels, but using standardized autocomplete HTML attribute[1] Think PR will be welcomed.
The HTML autocomplete attribute lets web developers specify what if any permission the user agent has to provide automated assistance in filling out form field values, as well as guidance to the browser as to the type of information expected in the field. ↩︎
