1120702 - Unable to send messages -- for an unknown reason

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Security, defect)

Description

[sam morris]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Thunderbird can't send mail via smtp.robots.org.uk (port 587 with STARTTLS).

This happened relatively recently... the user re-installed Windows and presumably updated to a newer version of Thunderbird that doesn't want to talk to the server.


Actual results:

Client-side error:

Sending of message failed.
The message could not be sent using SMTP server smtp.robots.org.uk for an unknown reason. Please verify that your SMTP server settings are correct and try again, or contact your network administrator.

Server-side error:

2015-01-12 23:09:30 TLS error on connection from foo.example ([192.168.x.x]) [x.x.x.x] (gnutls_handshake): A TLS fatal alert has been received.

Comment 1

[sam morris]

Fixed this by removing tls_require_ciphers = SECURE128 from exim.conf. Client still needs a better error message though.

Comment 2

[Wim Lewis]

I'm getting this error as well, all of a sudden. Presumably it's a configuration change on the server, but "for an unknown reason" is a truly bad user experience.

(In case it helps pinpoint the origin of "unknown errors" in the code, the server is postfix and it generates the log:  warning: TLS library problem: error:14094412:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert bad certificate:s3_pkt.c:1275:SSL alert number 42:
lost connection after STARTTLS from unknown[......])

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you still see this issue when using a current version?

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to sam morris from comment #1)

Fixed this by removing tls_require_ciphers = SECURE128 from exim.conf.
Client still needs a better error message though.

Do we have a bug report or patch for this?

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Sam, can you still reproduce this if you reverse your change?

Comment 6

[gene smith]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #4)

Do we have a bug report or patch for this?

Doesn't ring a bell for me...

Comment 7

[Kai Engert (:KaiE:)]

It sounds like the "server uses a bad certificate, thunderbird doesn't like it, but we don't give good user feedback" scenario.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

In the spirit of these two, or do we have a better bug?

• Bug 713714 - Incorrect Error message when using new account setup wizard to setup a server with self signed or revoked SSL certificates - bad cert listener is blocked
• Bug 1151322 - Generate better diagnostic messages when certificate issues cause SMTP STARTTLS connection failures

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

see comment 8

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

We currently have bug 1681960 open.
Re bug 1151322 : I'm not sure that's the case any more, IIRC it's not even if the message may be a bit cryptic

Comment 11

[hola]

Attachment: unable to send mail ever

I know nothing of any of the words on this page.