Possible bug or design pitfall due to web caching when using: Import templates at startup with URL

[tryfail]

The following is something I just this week came across when updating the templates stored on our webserver. The issue was that various computers using Thunderbird 140.4.0esr + Quicktext 6.4.6 were not getting the up-to-date templates from the same URL. All I could see were the previous template versions with outdated data.

For context, this was the first time I updated the JSON file in the last 2 months. 2 months ago I was still using XML files and URLs. The webserver at http://templates.my.domain/modelos-respostas.json is an nginx instance with minimal caching. Just after updating the JSON file with the templates, I could browse to that URL on Microsoft Edge (on the computers using Thunderbird) and see the updated templates and not the older version that I was getting in Quicktext

Things I tried that did not resolve the problem on my computers with existing Quicktext configuration:

• reinstalling plugin
• removing the URL and adding it again
• removing the URL and adding it again but using a different storage location (Quicktext > Advanced > Storage)
• in a test computer, deleting the various quicktext and extension folders in the Thunderbird Profile folder

Things that worked:

• new computer with freshly installed Thunderbird
• new Thunderbird profile
• clearing Thunderbird cache: Settings > General > Disk Space > Clear Now . For corroboration that the automatically downloaded JSON templates file was being cached, I confirmed it by creating a folder called "trash" in my Thunderbird Profile folder and creating a Config Editor record "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory" with value "C:\Users\MYUSERFOLDER\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\7hylou7r.default-release\trash". Just after relaunching Thunderbird, a file got created named trash\cache2\entries\8E0113944827C7680064C86A738846ECC47D7659 that contained the same content and size as my templates JSON file

This means that every time I update the JSON file on the webserver I must go to every computer and clear Thunderbird cache and the restart Thunderbird. At least it happened twice this week when I had to make changes to the templates on the webserver