CREATING PROFILES AND MAIL ACCOUNTS WITH PRESET VALUES

The following document explains the process that one needs to follow inorder to create
a profile and pre-populate a mailnews settings programatically. This will useful be
particularly useful those customers (like ISPs) who would like to use their settings
in creating profiles having mail accounts point to their servers.

In order to achieve what is being stated about, there are 2 steps involved here.

1. Create a Profile
   In 6.0, the profile creation process is much simpler than in 4.x. It only needs 
   the name of the profile and the location to store the profile files (i.e., profile folder). 
   Providing location to store profile files is not mandatory. If no location is picked, 
   the profile information is stored under default user profile folders location.

   Given your scenario the best way to create a profile is to use commandline argument
   "-CreateProfile". It creates a profile and quits the app. No UI is shown here.
   
   Usage : (mozilla is window's executable name)
   a. mozilla -nosplash -CreateProfile <profile name>
   b. mozilla -nosplash -CreateProfile "<profile name> <profile folder>"

   * option nosplash is to skip the little splash screen that app puts up.

   Example (on windows) :
   Say you ran mozilla -nosplash -CreateProfile foo. A registry entry is made with the
   name profile "foo". A folder named "foo" is created under default user profile folders
   location which is <APPLICATION DATA FOLDER>\Mozilla\Users50 for windows. On windows NT,
   that is typically C:\Winnt\Profiles\<user login name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Users50.

   For Mac, this default location is <DOCUMENTS FOLDER>:Mozilla:Users50 and 
   on Unix it is $HOME/.mozilla

   With the usage syntax, I have mentioned above there are couple of limitations.
   As space is used as tokenizer, any spaces in the name of the path could pose problems
   here. For example, if you want to create a profile in say in "c:\program files"..you will
   end up creating the profile in "c:\program". If c:\program doesn't exists, it is created.

   Another limitation you can notice here is the spaces in the name of the profile itself. 
   User can't have spaces in the profile name as the portion after the space is considered 
   as path. 

   Bugs have been filed on both these cases and we shall be making this approach more robust
   to handle various cases without having to limited by the spaces.

   If this the only profile that user is ever going to have, running Netscape 6 app, launches
   the browser window directly (no profile manager window as there is only one 6.0 profile)

   If the user has multiple profiles, then the command line option "-P" can be used to skip 
   the profile manager window. Say if the user has profiles "foo" and "bar", he/she can
   say "mozilla -P foo" and that will launch the browser directly with profile "foo".

2. Create a rdf file that contains mail settings

   In 6.0, profile creation process does not collect mail related settings to create a profile.
   This part is done in the Mail Application itself as it is launched. 

   There is facility for ISP to put all their information one file (rdf file) and place that 
   file in a location that mail app looks for. Now, run the Mozilla Application and open mail
   application. When that is done, that ISPs name pops up as one of the options, to setup the 
   mail account with. Once the user chooses that ISP option and proceeds further he/she will 
   find all mail settings prefilled and the account setup process will be very simple.