1431800 - NNTP: Thunderbird fails to download messages from forums.embarcadero.com

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[markus.humm]

Attachment: .dat and the .msf files for those three groups mentioned.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20180103231032

Steps to reproduce:

I tried to continue using NNTP on forums.embarcadero.com as I'm accustomed to but it fails to download new messages even when some exist. Other users of that forum server report that using some other NNTP clients they can download and read them just fine.

For further investigation I set up a fresh copy of TB (fresh download even!) and only added an account for that news server. I subscribed to 3 groups I know a bit. One contains a little bit over 35000 posts. When trying to download them I'm getting asked whether I want to download all or just the last 500 and whether I want to mark the others as read.

I opted to download all messages.


Actual results:

Status bar showed action. Messages seemed to be downloaded. Afterwards the number of unread messages for this group was about 29.000 something in the group list on the left hand side (value in () ). Now it is only 5267 and when I look at the messages the newest one is from August 2015. When I look at the web frontend of that group, I can see that the newest message in that group is from 19th January 2018!

Another one of the 3 groups selected shows an empty message panel and status bar displays "downloading message 1 from 110" forever...

That news server had some issues in the past and it's likely that the message IDs got a bit messed up, but reportedly ()y other users of that server using other NNTP clients) their NNTP clients can cope with this.

Data for the server:
forums.embarcadero.com
Port 563 
Security: SSL/TLS.


Expected results:

It should have downloaded all message headers and presented them as tree to me, even if there should be a break-up of message IDs of some sort somewhere in the data.

The 3rd group should not show "downloading message 1 from 110" forever. It needs a timeout mechanism and expected was that it actually downloads messages.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Hmm, to see which newsgroups you mentioned I needed to look at the zip file.

I subscribed to the third group, e.p.attachments. It claimed to have 5156 headers which I chose to download. The status bar suggested that all headers had been downloaded in a flash, but in the end I only had 196 messages.

Alfred, could you take a look at this please.

Comment 2

[markus.humm]

Hello,

thanks for looking at this. The attachments group wasn't even in my zip-file. The groups in this were eembarcadero.public.delphi.rtl, eembarcadero.public.delphi.firemonkey and embarcadero.developernetwork.qualitycentral which is most likely the smallest of those three.

Comment 3

[Alfred Peters [:infofrommozilla]]

(In reply to markus.humm from comment #0)
> Data for the server:
> forums.embarcadero.com

I queried the server via Telnet:

| group embarcadero.public.developernetwork.qualitycentral
| 211 1430 1 1478 embarcadero.public.developernetwork.qualitycentral group selected

The server claims there are 1430 articles from 1 - 1478
The difference is OK because some articles were probably canceled.

So let's get the first 1300 Header...

| xover 1-1300
| 224 Overview information follows
| .

No headers in that Range!?

| xover 1301-1400
| 224 Overview information follows
| 1306    XE6 Access [...]
| [...]
| 1368    Re: How to switch [...]
| .

At least some headers from 1306 to 1368.

| xover 1401-1477
| 224 Overview information follows
| 500 command not recognized
| closed

No new headers above 1400 and the server closes unexpectedly closes the connection.
I have received similar results from other groups.

Most likely, at least the Sever's XOVER database is broken.

> Expected results:
> 
> It should have downloaded all message headers and presented them as tree to
> me, even if there should be a break-up of message IDs of some sort somewhere
> in the data.

I can confirm, that TB doesn't show those ~60 articles from  e.p.d.qualitycentral
The cause may be because the server kicks us out.

Since the database is obviously incomplete, it is rather pointless to want to fix something here.

> The 3rd group should not show "downloading message 1 from 110" forever. It
> needs a timeout mechanism and expected was that it actually downloads
> messages.

I see the message flash. But it disappears in TB trunk.
I mean, that has already been fixed in another bug

Comment 4

[markus.humm]

Hello,

thanks for analyzing this matter in the first place. I can understand that the results of your analysis doesn't motivate you to do much if anything at all here. I just wonder why other users of these newsgroups I discussed the matter with don't seem to have these issues when using them with other NNTP clients. Means: it looks like other clients are more tolerant or have additional measures to cope with that situation.

One of the other NNTP clients regularily mentioned is Xananews, if that information helps (I didn't try that one yet). And the other thing is: up to 2 weeks ago or so, TB did work well enough with this server.

Comment 5

[Alfred Peters [:infofrommozilla]]

(In reply to markus.humm from comment #4)

> all here. I just wonder why other users of these newsgroups I discussed the
> matter with don't seem to have these issues when using them with other NNTP
> clients. 

In which group? In e.p.d.qualitycentral is the latest article from 2015.

| 1368    Re: How to switch off QualityCentral email notification Irina Kushnirik <>      Tue, 21 Jul 2015 15:50:53 -0700
<[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> 1250    2

In other groups I also see articles in the TB. But also only from 2015.
Only embarcadero.public.delphi.language.delphi.general contains three articles from 2018. I also see them in TB.

>  Means: it looks like other clients are more tolerant or have
> additional measures to cope with that situation.

Maybe the articles are still there in their offline storage.

> One of the other NNTP clients regularily mentioned is Xananews, if that
> information helps (I didn't try that one yet). And the other thing is: up to
> 2 weeks ago or so, TB did work well enough with this server.

That was probably the time when the database broke down.

Comment 6

[markus.humm]

Hello,

> In which group? In e.p.d.qualitycentral is the latest article from 2015.

the latest post as shown by the web interface of embarcadero.public.developernetwork.qualitycentral is from 16th january 2018. You can see it here: 

https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=276296&tstart=0

The discussion about my TB issues and behavior of other NNTP clients is here in embarcadero.public.developernetwork.website:

https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=276020&tstart=0

If you need me to post something there just tell me, or otherwise you can create a free account yourself so you can post there and not just read.

Comment 7

[Lu Wei]

Used Xananews 1.21 to test qualitycentral group, and the same result as Alfred Peters: the articles the could be get is from 1306 to 1368, which is dated to 2015. Manually add article number beyond 1400 got no results. So it seems at least a new user could not use that group by nntp clients. You could ask a Xananews user who could use the group normally post a latest article header to analysis.

Comment 8

[Alfred Peters [:infofrommozilla]]

(In reply to Lu Wei from comment #7)
> Used Xananews 1.21 to test qualitycentral group, and the same result as
> Alfred Peters:

Thanks for the confirmation. Everything else would have surprised me.

There is really nothing we can do in TB.
I can see new articles arrive in TB. But older ones will not come back until the server has been repaired.

Resolved: Invalid