Bugzilla

Since a couple of days, Thunderbird frequently pops up weird and confusing error messages (could not connect to host, could not save draft, unknown host "localhost", malformed .msf file, ...), and I was mystified what happened, and even wrongly suspected my DavMail gateway...
Until I accidentally clicked the attach button, and got a message about "too many files open".

At least that last message was clear (unlike the zillions before...). An lsof showed that Thunderbird had hundreds of .msf files open... and ended up hitting the open file limit of 1024.

The problem here is twofold:
1. Thunderbird should not keep that many files open, and close files once it is done reading them

2. And yet again, I'm not getting tired of repeating it, error messages should be clear and non-misleading. The problem had me mystified during days until finally I fat-fingered that god-sent attach button. Why is it so difficult to just take the damn message returned by the system and show it to the user? Or is this a deliberate political decision born out of a misguided desire to pander to Outlook switchovers or whatever? Is it really thunderbird's idea of userfriendliness that we have to run "strace -p `pidof thunderbird` 2>&1 | fgrep --line-buf '= -1 E' | fgrep --line-buf -v EAGAIN " along with thunderbird just to understand what's wrong with it? (and even that wouldn't help if the error was raised by a library such as ssl...)