1369979 - Firefox Sync Emails very Slow

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Cloud Services :: Server: Firefox Accounts, defect)

Description

[Frank Nestel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170518000419

Steps to reproduce:

Installing Firefox on a new device.
Activating Sync.
Typing username/password.
Seeing the screen, that a confirmation mail has been sent.


Actual results:

Nothing ... for a long while. For example now I am waiting one and a half hour. I have not giving up, cause the previous device I got that mail the other day.


Expected results:

Mail should either come "instant", i.e. within minutes, or the FF Sync Screen shall explain, that mail take a long while (maybe also, why this is). Otherwise FF generates busy users inspecting inbox and all kind of junk places, finally giving up and hating FF Sync.

Last devices: 2 Notebooks and 1 Android Tablett. All the same.

Comment 1

[Frank Nestel]

Oops, and I forgot to mention: I checked my mail provider. Sending from 2 other providers to that provider with the firefox sync mailbox takes seconds, i.e. way less than a minute.

Comment 2

[Frank Nestel]

Additional chunk of thought. Now I still have no mail, 24 hours of waiting. Can it be, that in the mean time you have implemented a policy against aliassed mails? I mean I use "[e-mail]" for syncing my account, but I never got any warning, that this kind of "+" alias is not wanted.

Comment 3

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

> Can it be, that in the mean time you have implemented a policy against aliassed mails?

No, aliased emails like the one you posted should work fine.

Frank, do you know if your email provider has any sort of "greylisting" system in effect as an anti-spam measure?  We've seem Firefox Accounts email get caught up in greylisting systems in the past due to the way they tend to be sent from different IP addresses over time.

Comment 4

[Frank Nestel]

According to my mail hoster, they do not have IP greylisting or something similar explaining a problem with firefox IPs.

Comment 5

[Frank Nestel]

I'd like to update this. 

Moving to Waterfox on desktop, I needed a sync mail and got one immediately.

Now I tried once more to sync a Firefox on an Android device ... and got no mail.

I am using the same mail account in both cases and 4 tests of mine now say, I do not get sync mails for mobile Firefox, but I get it for Desktop Firefox and Waterfox. Please inspect what is different with mails generated from sync logon on mobile.

Comment 6

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

Thanks for the update Frank.

This certainly seems to point to a problem that's specific to the mobile device...but I can't really imagine anything that would cause such a difference.  The emails are sent by the same code path in our backend service for both desktop and mobile Firefox.  We do insert a little bit of device-specific information into the emails (e.g. trying to describe the device by parsing its user-agent string, and doing a geolocation lookup on the IP address to include location info) and I suppose that could be causing some sort of error.

What version of Firefox for Android are you using, and on what sort of device?

Also, I'm sorry to ask, but for completeness: are you 100% sure the emails are not ending up in your spam folder?

Comment 7

[Frank Nestel]

- I've been checking my spam folders all the time, cause I'd really like that device to be in sync. Also the non mobile mail just pops up in regular inbox, where it should be. Shouldn't that rule out all provider issues either?
- The affected device is Android 6.0.1 Lenovo Yoga tablet, Firefox is the latest I got from Play Store 56.0, it was an earlier version, when I reported this issue first.
- I've hit that "send again" (however it is named, I have a German Android UI) button on the mobile device so often and I get the green bar "mail has been sent" all the time. That gave me such a surprise, when I more or less hopeless requested the mail on desktop yesterday and it instantly worked within seconds.
- I can also mention, that I have one Android device (ancient, 4.2 Samsung S4 Active), that is synced, so I must have got such a mail 4 years ago or so.

Comment 8

[Frank Nestel]

OK, whatever, I just hit that "send mail" button on my pad a few more times, and just got that ONE mail now. This is better than last night, but obviously I cannot contribute any more to tracing down the issue. I just need to watch that device, cause it now claims to be in sync, but (not yet) isn't. But this would probably be a different issue?!

Comment 9

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

I'm glad to here it came through for you; wish I could explain what might be going wrong though :-(

> I just need to watch that device, cause it now claims to be in sync  but (not yet) isn't

It *may* just be taking a long time to sync up, or might appear more in sync after restarting the browser.  If it continues to claim its syncing but doesn't seem to be doing the right thing, please do file a bug for us to investigate.

Comment 10

[Frank Nestel]

Thx Ryan. Claims to sync, but no sync at all, but this is a different issue and for now I attached myself here: bug #1073680.