1237051 - Failure to save outgoing message handled poorly - retry never works even if network problem was resolved

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1366591

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Mikhail T.]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0
Build ID: 20151228013945

Steps to reproduce:

When sending an outgoing e-mail to the Sent-folder fails for some reason, Thunderbird's reaction is deficient:

1. No actual error is communicated to the user (remote IMAP-server failed? local disk is full?)
2. The message does not reassure the user, that their e-mail was successfully sent.
3. The only options given are "Retry" and "Cancel" -- there should be a method for saving the copy somewhere else.
4. In my experience the "Retry" never actually works -- certainly not in the cases, when the Sent-folder is on a remote IMAP-server. It is not the server's fault, because after TB is restarted, message-sending starts working again.

The last item is, probably, the most important, but others should be addressed too.

I'm picking version 38, because that's what I have now, but the problem bothered me for years...

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

this is very much a duplicate of one or more existing bug reports

Comment 2

[Mikhail T.]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, use Needinfo for questions) from comment #1)
> this is very much a duplicate of one or more existing bug reports

I, actually, tried to find these problems mentioned before filing my own. The closest match is Bug #764197, but even that is a very different case.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

It would help to cite the precise message

Comment 5

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Reopening as per bug 28211 comment #87 (quote):
===
Even when the user asked to "try again", the attempt to save would keep fail even if the underlying reason for the failure was eliminated -- the entire TB had to be restarted for the saving into a remote folder to start working again. The actual error was never communicated to the end-user either (although the admin could deduce something from IMAP-server's logs).
===

Gene, would you be able to take a look here now that bug 28211 is fixed. Have you tried the "retry" after re-establishing the network connection?

Comment 6

[gene smith]

The fix for save to local folders when imap down really doesn't affect the retry code. It usually works OK for me after I re-enable the imap tcp/ip port that was disabled via firewall as a test. I will try it again just to make sure...(it did). However, I think this bug is referring to the situation where the imap connection is spontaneously dropped (by tb or by server?) and has been down for a while, in which case the retry doesn't work. I have never seen this spontaneous drop happen but it has been reported a lot, such as this bug. I think a work-around for this might be to force an imap SELECT on the destination folder (by selecting it with mouse) which will force tb to reconnect which could cause the retry to work without restarting tb. My theory is that the save operation doesn't have this effect.

Comment 7

[fettucini]

I'd like to vote for speeding up the bug fix, since bug 28211 is still well and alive in 52.7 ESR, and so is this related bug.

If it could get fixed together with 28211 for the next ESR 60.0, which officially should be released in May, that would be marvellous. 

It's pretty unsatisfactory to re-open saved drafts for ongoing work, finding that inlined or attached images are amiss.

Comment 8

[gene smith]

The bug as described in comment 0 no long exists and seems to "work for me" when a failure to save to Sent occurs. I recommend closing this as a duplicate of Bug 1366591 and if there are other more specific complaints regarding this against >=ESR 60 they should be entered as a new bug.