.desktop files, Mailspring client password storage error

General system Applications
1

I’ve found Mailspring to be the best email client for me - would love to use something more community-driven like Firebird or Geary but they just don’t work as well for me. Anyway, last update changed something about how they store credentials and I now always get an error on start:

image

This is a known issue and the official solution is to launch with an argument:

mailspring --password-store="gnome-libsecret"

That works but I can only launch from a terminal which I need to keep open all the time. However when I edit the .desktop file as suggested in that post, it still gives me the error when I launch Mailspring from rofi or just gtk-launch Mailspring.desktop.

Any suggestions?

2

Copy the desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications. Then edit the desktop file and change the exec line to match what you used above.

1 Like
3

Sigh, no joy, feels like something is still overriding it. I’m usually pretty good at solving this kind of problem but this Mailspring update has totally defeated me for over a week :sob:

4

maybe re-write the exec line to look like this see if that does it.
bash -e mailspring --password-store="gnome-libsecret"

5

OK edit the desktop file in /usr/share/applications. then:

sudo chattr +i /usr/share/applications/<name-of-desktop>.desktop

Nothing can overwrite that :smiley:

6

Sorry I didn’t mean something is literally overwriting the file. Just no changes seem to affect this behavior.

7

OK finally got this working via editing the copy in /usr. Might try to override it in ~/.local at some point as that does seem like a better way to maintain this.

8

Editing files in /usr is very prone to breaking over time, with updates. Expect to have to edit this file periodically.

You should really figure out how to override it in your home directory. Here is an example: