1203073 - Thunderbird scans mail server file system because of namespace setting

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Thomas Tornblom]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; SunOS i86pc; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0
Build ID: 20150815015020

Steps to reproduce:

After upgrading TB on my MacBook from 31.8 to 38.x I noticed TB appeared to scan the mailboxes for quite a while, apparently going nowhere, until I killed it and downgraded to 31.8 again.


Actual results:

While trying to debug the issue I noticed that the imapd (WU 2007f) daemon on the Solaris server was scanning through what appeared to be the entire servers filesystem.

Checking a snoop of the traffic between client and server I noticed a reference to #ftp, after which there was a lot of references to the servers files, unrelated to mail.

Turned out to be the advanced server settings in the mail account that lists:
"#public/","#news.","#ftp/","#shared/" in the public (shared) namespace.

The server has this standard Solaris passwd entry:
---
ftp:x:21:21:FTPD Reserved UID:/:
---

So the ftp user has "/" as the home directory, and TB tries to scan all ~ftp files, which turns out to be the entire server filesystem.

This is apparently different from what it was with 31.x and older as this has never been an issue before.

Removing the "#ftp" entry in the clients account config allowed TB to start up quickly without scanning the servers filesystem.


Expected results:

Nothing should have scanned the #ftp files by default at startup.