[Thunderbird portable on w10] Notifications work on a machine but not on another one (using the same portable installation of Thunderbird)

[wokawoka]

I installed this great add-on on a portable version of Thunderbird (official version from portableapps.com).
The extension works great on a first windows 10 machine (thank you so much, it's so great to have native notifications working!) but when I move the portable folder on another windows 10 machine (fresh win10 installation) the notifications don't work (and testing the notifications from the option panel doesn't produce any visual output at all).
I tried to uninstall and reinstall the add-on but apparently while uninstalling some config files still remain on the profile because when I install the add-on again from the xpi my old settings are still there (the list of folders to allow the notification from, for example).
Do you have an idea why the add-on is working when I start thunderbird portable on a machine but doesn't work on a similar but different W10 machine?
Would it be possible to know which files should I remove from the local thunderbird profile to start with a fresh installation of the add-on?
Thank you very much again for this great add-on and keep up the good work!

[kabili207]

As the author of the GNotifier's Windows integration, perhaps I can shed some light on why this isn't working.

In order for an application to use Windows' notification system, it actually has to be installed on the computer and have a shortcut in the start menu. I suspect it works on the one computer because it's using the AppID of a locally installed version of thunderbird.

[wokawoka]

Thank you for your reply kabili!

It's strange because for a while I had two thunderbird portable installations on two different windows systems regularly displaying windows notifications through GNotifier without never having installed thunderbird on those systems (actually I'm not using the regular installed version of thunderbird since years) ...
I don't know the reason why in a way or another it was initially working, anyway unfortunately since a while now the notifications are not working anymore, either it happened after a windows update, a thunderbird update, or a gnotifer one.

That's a pity because it was a very useful feature.
Thank you again for your work!

[wokawoka]

Just a quick idea: as I'm pretty sure of having used other portable programs that were outputting messages to the notification system as well, couldn't it possible that the notifications were working on a portable installation because maybe thunderbird and gnotifier were outputting traybar pop-up balloons and those were translated by windows to notification messages (I believe that the old traybar pop-ups doesn't exist anymore on windows 10)?
Could this be a possible explanation?

[tooomm]

In order for an application to use Windows' notification system, it actually has to be installed

@kabili207 I'm pretty sure this is not true. I use a bunch of portable applications which have never been installed before/in parallel... for example Telegram Portable.
Notifications with even the logo of the writing person are working like a charm on Windows 10 for new messages.
My portable Thunderbird has working notifications with GNotifier as well (without TB being installed).

[kabili207]

@wokawoka The Windows version of doesn't use tray popups to display notifications. Although it is an interesting idea...

@tooomm That is both very awesome and very disconcerting to hear. Awesome because that limitation was extremely annoying to develop around, and I'm very happy to see it removed. It made creating plugins for other applications a pain because not all applications set an AppUserModelID during installation. But's it's disconcerting because the official documentation explicitly states an application must have an entry in the Start Menu with an AppUserModelID defined on the shortcut.

So while it's awesome that the notifications work with portable apps, it's not an officially documented behavior. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was testing this new feature in some builds on Windows 10 and plan to officially support it soon. Until then, there's not much I can do to help, because officially it shouldn't have worked in the first place.

Well, that and the fact that my day-to-day interactions with Windows are now centered a Win 7 box that my current client gave me which I can't use Thunderbird on.

[wokawoka]

Hello kabili,
I just did some tests again on two different laptops running windows 10.
Both of the laptop never had thunderbird installed.
In this right moment Gnotifier is able to properly trigger the notifications from both thunderbird portable programs and I'm regularly using it in the same way since a long time (I believe since more than one year).
I believe you can try gnotifier on thunderbird portable yourself, at the beginning it probably works ok out of the box.

The name of the application (written with a small font in the last line of the notification pop-up, but also listed in the program list of the windows notification settings menu) is never Thunderbird but, istead, always consists of apparently random characters like DCAD1B5AE66EDD07, 79D06C0435F427DA, 8A69C2F324A5A995 and so on.
I have multiple entries like that in the windows notification settings program list of the same windows installation, but I don't know if this is the result of the fact that this string changes from time to time or, instead, to the fact that I may have done some tests in the past from some different thunderbird portable programs.

Recently the notifications from one of the two laptop stopped to work for some months once again (and the same happened in the past) but each time it got fixed by iteself simply after Thunderbird autoupdated with the latest patch.
I don't know what brakes the notifications after a while on thunderbird portable, but what is sure is that after a thunderbird update it always starts to work again.
That's why I initially asked you which files are written by the add-on on the disk (and on which folder), because I just wanted to try to delete them so I could completely uninstall and install back the add-on starting with completely clean preferences.
I guess that this information could help a lot. If I could trigger the same file changes that apparently are made with a thunderbird update in order to "unblock" the gnotifier notifications when, from time to time, they stop to work I would be an happy camper.
Thank you again