139352 - "Ask before downloading > ZERO messages" causes mozilla to download ALL messages

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Networking: NNTP, defect)

Description

[Ian Pottinger]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:0.9.9+)
Gecko/20020419
BuildID:    2002041903

I ran across this bug when I tried to subscribe to a busy newsgroup.  I did not
want to download any of the past or current messages and I wanted all messages
to be marked read.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. In MailNews Account Settings > Server Stettings, check and set
   "Ask me before downloading more than [ 0   ] messages."
2. Subscribe to a new newsgroup on the above server.
3. Select the new newsgroup.


Actual Results:  Mozilla downloads ALL messages in the newsgroup. (47,000+ in
the group I subscribed to.  Thank God for megbit modems!)


Expected Results:  On selecting the new newsgroup, the "Download Headers" dialog
should have appeared.  The user would then have the opportunity to select how
many, if any, messages to download and whether the remaining should be marked as
read.

Comment 1

[Ian Pottinger]

I also submitted bug 139354 along with this one.  That bug sets up the user to
encounter this one.  At first, I thought of them as one large bug but then I
realised that the two issues could be resolved separately and independently.

Comment 2

[Daniel Küstner]

Can see this on Linux 1.3a too.

Workaround: If you ran into this bug, find the pref 

"mail.server.server10.max_articles"

in your prefs.js, whereby 10 is the number of the server and change it to the
value you want. I guess, that this pref is for people that don't want to be
asked in the future. It makes sense to have it in the prefs.js like that,  but
it is somewhat irritating, that you can enable it from the ui, but can only
disable it by editing prefs.js.

Suggesting an option in Mail&Newsgroup Account Settings -> Offline & Disk Space.

Comment 3

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

btw: Bug is still present in current Mozilla builds

Comment 4

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 5

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I can't speak to Seamonkey, but this is WFM in thunderbird.  0 setting is changed to 1 by account manager. 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090621 Shredder/3.0b3pre