1383635 - "Check for new messages every 10 minutes" does not work when when authentication methos is Kerberos / GSSAPI for POP3 (OK for IMAP)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1155614

(Thunderbird :: Security, defect)

Description

[martalex]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Hello. I found a bug in all versions of Mozilla Thunderbird.
When the POP3 server type is set and the Kerberos / GSSAPI authentication type is configured, and the value "Check for new messages every 10 minutes" is configured, the messages do not come to me. That is, Thunderbird does not send requests to the server. With the "Normal password" authentication method this works.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

But manual retrieval works? Can you upgrade to TB 52.2.1, which is our current version.

Comment 2

[martalex]

If I press the "get mail" button, it works. I also tried these settings on the TB version 52.2.1.

Comment 3

[martalex]

The same problem is in the bug # 511832.
I run Thunderbird c with the set environment variables NSPR_LOG_MODULES and NSPR_LOG_FILE and no activity at the time when I should receive the mail I did not see.

Comment 4

[kraynopp]

I have the same problem. Thunderbird does not check for new email automatically if I use pop3 protocol and Kerberos/GSSAPI. Manually check with GSSAPI works. IMAP+GSSAPI works well manually and automatically. IMAP/POP3+password also works manually and automatically.

Tested in debian 9.2 x86_64 (thunderbird 52.3) and in windows 7 (thunderbird 52.4).

Comment 5

[kraynopp]

Thunderbird 52.6 on debian 9.4 x86_64. Problem still exists.

P.S.: Do you need some additional information to resolve this issue?

P.P.S.: Anybody home? Somebody? Anybody? :(

Comment 6

[kraynopp]

Thunderbird 60.2.1 on debian 9.6 x86_64. Problem still exists.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Danny, do you have experience in this area. See also

• Bug 1155614 - 31.x pop account gets mail on startup, and then stops getting new mail. Fails with authentication via Kerberos, plain text auth works

Comment 9

[Dan Pernokis]

Sorry, Wayne, I've never knowingly used Kerberos in any capacity. Nor can I recall any similar instance where TB stops checking for mail.

But thinking out loud: What happens if an authentication fails mildly? Does TB just try again? Or does it flag the channel as insecure and give up? (Maybe TB sees manual getmail as an acknowledgement that a human has seen the problem and wants to continue, whereas the automatic getmails presume the worst and stop polling to avoid problems. And maybe this happens often or always with Kerberos -- but rarely with the others, so the symptom rarely appears.)

Comment 10

[Anne]

Thunderbird Version 68.1.2, Windows 10 Home edition

"Check for new messages every 10 minutes" does not work with Authentication set to OAuth2 for any of my email accounts.

Get Messages - Get All New Messages does not work with Authentication set to OAuth2 for any of my email accounts.

With Authentication set to OAuth2, if I click on Inbox to force Thunderbird to check for new emails, the Date field of incoming messages (not ones where I Cc'ed myself) is set to the current time that I retrieved the message, not the actual time of the message shown if I do View Source on the open message.

The above problems also happen with Authentication set to Normal password.

This problem is currently happening on October 22, 2019. I have several email accounts in use in Thunderbird. None of them show new messages unless I exit and re-open Thunderbird or I manually click on each Inbox to force Thunderbird to look for new messages.

Comment 11

[gene smith]

I have no accounts that use Kerberos / GSSAPI so don't have a way to try this. Can anyone suggest a free email account that uses this or maybe provide me with a temporary test account using Kerberos/GSSAPI?

Regarding comment 10 above, I have never seen the problem described with oauth2. If the reporter is still seeing oauth2 problems I would suggest entering this as a new bug with more details since the subject of this bug is Kerberos.

Comment 12

[gene smith]

I have tried the "Kerberos/GSSAPI" account the Wayne found on aegee.org and configured it for Kerberos/GSSAPI authentication and it seems to work. However, after setting it up I realized that the current bug is for POP3 and the test account is IMAP and I don't see a problem with imap getting new mail via the timed "biff". The reporter of the current bug also verified it is OK with IMAP and is just a pop3 problem.

In comment 7 above a duplicate bug is referenced. I looked there and realized I had already done a lot of work on this and then that bug's reporter indicated here, bug 1155614 comment 26, that the bug is fixed if you do a clean install! Should we take him at is word and just close the current bug and bug 1155614 as duplicates?

This may be a separate bug but in bug 1155614 comment 25 I experienced MOZ_ASSERT crashes when I enabled kerberos/gssapi auth in tb (a trunk debug build). I saw them again today and and had to comment out a ton of MOZ_ASSERT(NS_IsMainThread()) calls in a couple of files to avoid crashes. Didn't see other problems after doing this so maybe code being on main-thread in this case isn't important? (MOZ_ASSERTs are ignored in not-DEBUG builds, i.e., release builds.)