1502595 - ambiguous display "smtp server error"

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Networking: SMTP, defect)

Description

[Alessandro]

Attachment: 2018_10_27_Bugzilla_bug_SMTP.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1) I turn off the router (or the router turns off / does not connect to the internet)
2) I try to send an email



Actual results:

3) The ambiguous message (IMO) appears, especially for beginners: "SMPT server error on exit"

Obviously (!) I control the SMTP parameters but I do not see any errors.


Expected results:

Suggestion:
Display the message "SMTP server error on exit / no Internet connection (check router")

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Along the lines of bug 366938 ?

Comment 2

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

We've just polished SMTP errors in bug 1497488.

Looks like your translation from Italian is not correct. The Italian error is:
smtpSendFailedUnknownServer=Si è verificato un errore durante l'invio della posta: Server posta in uscita (SMTP) %S sconosciuto. Il server potrebbe essere configurato in modo non corretto. Verificare che le impostazioni del server in uscita (SMTP) siano corrette e riprovare.

In Eglish that is:
smtpSendFailedUnknownServer=An error occurred while sending mail: Outgoing server (SMTP) %S is unknown. The server may be incorrectly configured. Please verify that your Outgoing server (SMTP) settings are correct and try again.

Gene, can we do a better error when the internet connection goes away?

Comment 3

[gene smith]

Better?:

smtpSendFailedUnknownServer=An error occurred while sending mail: A connection to outgoing server (SMTP) %S could not be established. Please verify that your Outgoing server (SMTP) settings are correct and try again. 

Probably "The server may be incorrectly configured." is redundant, unless it is suggesting that the SMTP server owner has mis-configured their server, which is unlikely.

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I meant to distinguish "unknown server" from "connection error". Is that possible? In the first case the DNS lookup fails, in the second case, any network access fails.

Comment 5

[gene smith]

Looks like there are already 2 error message strings (triggered by separate error codes) that distinguish between unknown host (DNS problem?) and unable to connect:

smtpSendFailedUnknownServer  (reporter is seeing this)
smtpSendRequestRefused

Comment 6

[gene smith]

Reporter, I don't think tb has any way to know for sure that your router of turned off. But the message tb emits might be more helpful, e.g.,

An error occurred while sending mail: Outgoing server (SMTP) %S can't be reached. The server address may be incorrectly configured or the internet can't be accessed. Please verify that your Outgoing server (SMTP) settings are correct and try again.

Comment 7

[Alessandro]

Better like this:

"An error occurred while sending mail: the outgoing server (SMTP)% S can not be reached. The server address may be configured incorrectly or the Internet can not be accessed (check router / modem / tethering on smartphone.) Check that the outgoing mail (SMTP) server settings are correct and try again."

:)

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Gene, can you put up a patch?

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Version 91 has all new smtp backend code. If you can still reproduce this issue, please file a new bug report https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MailNews%20Core&component=Networking%3A%20SMTP