Open Bug 859265 Opened 11 years ago Updated 8 months ago

Bad messages in outbox should be marked bad and not resent

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Product:
MailNews Core
Component:
Backend
Platform:
x86_64
Linux
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

People

(Reporter: jik, Unassigned)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug)

Details

If there is a message in the outbox that cannot be sent, e.g., because it has a badly formatted email address in the header or something, then the backend will attempt to send that message every time someone calls File | Send Unsent Messages.

One of the problems this causes is mentioned in bug 749654 -- the backend gives up on the Outbox after the first failure so the rest of the messages in the Outbox are not sent -- but there is another issue that needs to be addressed, i.e., that the bad message gets sent over and over again.

This causes its own set of problems, e.g., one user of my add-on (English not his native language) reported that because Thunderbird kept trying to deliver an invalid message, "my email provider blocked my account for that reasons (many incorrect smtps tries per minutes)."

If a message in the Outbox fails to send, the backend should probably mark it bad or move it out of the Outbox or do something else to prevent it from being sent again until the user takes steps to confirm that it is OK.

On the other hand, I can envision circumstances in which it shouldn't do this, but rather should in fact attempt to deliver the message again. Perhaps the behavior should be configurable, or perhaps it should count how many failures there have been and only give up after a preset number of them.
Blocks: 749654
Severity: normal → S3

The problem mentioned above is a big problem!

Especially, as for some reasons, I used the outbox as standard sendig option (mailnews.sendInBackground: true)

Today I noticed, that a bunch of 15 Mails from the last 3 days were not sent! (one very important mail included).

The reason:

  • The receiving mailserver denied accepting a mail from me because of a (false) greylisting.
  • Thunderbird never showed any error message (!) to me.
  • And it did not even try to send any of the other 14 mails.... It stuck on the undeliverable mail.

Expected:

  • Error messages for the outbox
  • Skipping undeliverable messaes

Thanks a lot!

Addition:

  • My System is a Windows 10 with TB 115.2.0 64 Bit

So this 11 year old problem is still present...

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