224878 - pop account permanently blocked with hourglass

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Michael Bravo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

This is NOT the same as bug #199808 - it might be related, though.

Apparently, after receiving one of the recent nastygrams (a worm, a virus, or a
spam message of a particularly badly mangled format), one of my POP-3 accounts
becomes blocked. I have several IMAP and POP accounts defined, and all of them
work OK, except this one. Blockage displays as an hourglass cursor at any of the
account folders/elements on the account tree window. No items are shown if Inbox
is selected (however, Inbox is not empty, and performed as usual before the
problem occurred). Inbox file in the account directory on disk doesn't look as
being damaged in any way. When I move cursor away from the problematic account
entries in the tree, it becames a normal arrow, and all other accounts function
normally, without a need to click "stop" or anything else.

Reproducing: this is a bit tricky. When this first occurred, after some
struggling  have deleted the account in Thunderbird, gone to the machine holding
the actual mail (I have shell access there) and cleaned mailbox from all spam
and malware mails. Then I created a new account for the same mailbox. It worked
for some days, then broke down again with exartly the same (described above)
symptoms. I can't provide you with my entire mailbox due to some sensitive
information it contains, but I can provide parts of it on request. I have
verified that the problem is not at the server side, as I can read the mailbox
in question with mutt locally and POP-server operates the mailbox all right
(checked manually by telnetting to port 110 and entering commands by hand)

This has occurred with Thunderbird 0.2 as well


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Needs specific data to be reproduced, see Details.
Actual Results:  
Account locks up, I can't access any mails in it, neither new, nor old ones
already on my hard disk.

Expected Results:  
Report/fix mailbox corruption if any occurs; preferably - parse around the
problem. It should NOT block access to the whole mailbox.

Comment 1

[Michael Bravo]

I see the version of my current Thunderbird build didn't get included - it is

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3 (20031013)

Comment 2

[Marcel Anacker]

This one still occures in Thunderbird 0.6RC1. It's the most annoying bug for me,
since the only workaround is logging in the web interface and delete the corrput
mail. It might be worth noticing, that Thunderbird reports an error message
"That folder is being processed", when pressing "Get Mail" again, while the
fetching process is blocked in the abovementioned way. Here are two examples of
such "corrupt mails" that caused blocking for me. It seems, that the mail ends
somehow unexpectedly in the header. These are copied from the details view of
the web interface of my mail provider, so they are most probably not binary safe:

Return-Path:
Original-Recipient: rfc822;[e-mail]
Received: from [218.27.1.34] (218.27.1.34) by mail.epost.de (6.7.015)
id 407D0037001DC255; Fri, 23 Apr 2004 01:50:20 +0200
Sender: [e-mail] (derived from envelope by
[e-mail])
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 01:50:20 +0200 (added by [e-mail])
Message-ID: <[e-mail]> (added by
[e-mail])
X-Message-Info: ZYZj[1



Return-Path:
Original-Recipient: rfc822;[e-mail]
Received: from c-67-173-119-147.client.comcast.net (67.173.119.147) by
mail.epost.de (6.7.015)
id 4088D11F0000BB37; Fri, 23 Apr 2004 14:27:31 +0200
X-Message-Info: 16+uyoaxlg9387/lxnOEnjfSCulzCjyH3WYt
Received: (qmail 3748 invoked by uid 89886); Fri, 23 Apr 2004 16:26:11 +0300
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 12:26:11 -0100
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
From: "Heidi Acosta"
Reply-To: [e-mail]
To: "Macky"
Subject: modulate cultivable trimester anonymity innards countrywide halstead
permit ned crystalline highwaymen nineteen caruso monomial paragon irritate
tuttle deregulate azalea allergy abo dichotomous geographer sykes neumann
lymphoma employee boredom seton breakpoint stopwatch rundown blizzard barnacle
chunk cowboy magnetic behavioral
MIME-Version: 1.0 (produced by manila[2

Comment 3

[Lorenzo Colitti]

This looks like the MIME issue fixed in bug 244722 and should be fixed now.

Reporter, please open the bug if you see it again on a recent build.