Closed Bug 1673380 Opened 5 years ago Closed 3 months ago

thunderbird does not mark some email messages as read, if message is multi-part body with an x-vcard section

Categories

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
General
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: kljbonnema, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: DUPEME)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:82.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/82.0

Steps to reproduce:

After upgrade from 68 to 78.4.0 The behaviour of automatically marking emails as read changed. I have set Mark messages as read after 1 seconds and also tried with Mark messages as read immediately.
I click a mail item in the summary pane and it opens in the preview pane. Some messages do not get marked as read.

Actual results:

If I click a message in the summary pane then normally it changes from bold to normal font because it is marked as read and the green unread indicator turns grey.
This does not work for some messages. I am not sure why but it seems to happen with some (not all) emails that are created as a BCC to myself from a response that I have sent.
Even if I click on another message and then on the faulty message it does not mark as read. I can right click and mark it manually.

Expected results:

All messages that are clicked in the summary pane should be marked as read with the automatic mark as read option turned on.

Can you reproduce without add-ons? Help | Restart with add-ons disabled.

Whiteboard: DUPEME

I was not running active add-ons. I have two add-ons that were both disabled because there was no compatible version available for 78.4.0. One of them, Lookout (fix version) has in the mean time been released and updated for 78.4.0. That is after I reported the problem.

Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the problem at will. I can send emails and reply to emails and each of them will have a BCC to myself. Only some of them stay marked as unread.

I just got another one that does not get marked as unread. Is there anything that I can check or so to see what is special about this message?

It appears that the messages that are not marked as read have a References: and/or an In-Reply-To: mail header.
The References: and In-Reply-To: will refer to a Message-ID: from the message that was replied to.
I guess that this ties in with the logic that shows related messages grouped as communications.
I have show as communications turned off displaying all messages as a single entry. The messages are shown in a shared inbox that shares multiple accounts.

I think that I have identified why some e-mail messages are not automatically marked as read.
The message in question will have an multi-part body with an x-vcard section. The x-vcard has a base64 content of bnVsbA== which converts to null.

Problem 1. Thunderbird allows the account setting to attach a v-card to an outgoing message but does not enforce that the v-card has any meaningfull information.
Problem 2. Thunderbird will encounter a ParserError on receiving the email with the null x-vcard section. The ParserError will prevent the subsequent action to mark the message as read.
The console.log will show: uncaught exception: ParserError: invalid line (no token ";" or ":") "null"

This was discovered when the DKIM verifier add-on attempted to validate the message. The validation also triggers the ParserError but DKIM verifier does not get an actual parsed message.

Workaround: turn off the account setting to add a vcard or add meningfull vcard information to add. This workaround will however only apply to the sender part (Problem 1.) The receiving part may still fail if you receive e-mails initiated by another Thunderbird instance where this setting is active with null vcard data.

Anonimized part of a failing message. The full message is available on request:

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------86C66FE9284A676D16C05A46
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<html>
<head>

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

</head>
<body>
test
</body>
</html>

--------------86C66FE9284A676D16C05A46
Content-Type: text/x-vcard;
name="account_name.vcf"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="account_name.vcf"

bnVsbA==
--------------86C66FE9284A676D16C05A46--

Some additions from my side:

  • the parsing error only seem to cause follow up problems if the mail is viewed as Original HTML. With both Simple HTML and Plain Text, the marking as unread and the DKIM Verifier work as expected.
  • for the add-on case, it is the listener added to browser.messageDisplay.onMessageDisplayed that fails to be called
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Component: Untriaged → General
Ever confirmed: true
Summary: thunderbird does not mark some email messages as read → thunderbird does not mark some email messages as read, if message is multi-part body with an x-vcard section

Can you still reproduce today, kljbonnema?

I have not seen this problem in the wild since I created the bug report and turned off my empty vcard in Thunderbird.

I have now turned on vcard in Thunderbird #1 (128.6.0esr) and tested by sending to Thunderbird #2 (128.5.2esr).

Just marking the option to send a vcard will result in no vcard.

I then opened the vcard setup in Thunderbird #1, entered nothing and closed it again.
When I now send a message, an empty vcard is added - base64: QkVHSU46VkNBUkQNClZFUlNJT046NC4wDQpFTkQ6VkNBUkQNCg== which translates to:
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:4.0
END:VCARD

The original problem where I could send a vcard with a base64 null record has been fixed.

I cannot confirm or deny that Thunderbird can handle an incomming e-mail with a null vcard record (base64 86C66FE9284A676D16C05A46 = null)
When I reported the problem this would result in a parsererror and as a result the message would not be marked as read.

Maybe @plieser can verify the incomming part of this bug report?

I just tried to reproduce the Problem with Thunderbird 128.6.0esr and failed.

What I did:

  1. Add an e-mail with the problematic x-vcard attachment to a (local) folder in Thunderbird
  2. Configured Thunderbird to show Original HTML.
  3. Mark the e-mail as unread.
  4. Have an add-on installed that uses browser.messageDisplay.onMessageDisplayed
  5. Viewed the email.

It now behaved as expected:

  • The e-mail was marked as read.
  • The listener of the add-on was called

What I still got is the following error in the error console, don't know if that is expected behavior:

Error creating vCard properties ParserError: invalid line (no token ";" or ":") "null"
    ParserError resource:///modules/calendar/Ical.sys.mjs:1942
    _handleContentLine resource:///modules/calendar/Ical.sys.mjs:2053
    parse resource:///modules/calendar/Ical.sys.mjs:1882
    _eachLine resource:///modules/calendar/Ical.sys.mjs:2392
    parse resource:///modules/calendar/Ical.sys.mjs:1881
    fromVCard resource:///modules/VCardUtils.sys.mjs:670
    AddrBookCard resource:///modules/AddrBookCard.sys.mjs:38
    get vCardProperties resource:///modules/AddrBookCard.sys.mjs:199
    vCardToAbCard resource:///modules/VCardUtils.sys.mjs:165
    convertToHTML resource:///modules/VCardUtils.sys.mjs:271
AddrBookCard.sys.mjs:64:15

Thanks for testing.

What I still got is the following error in the error console, don't know if that is expected behavior:

If that still occurs, please file a new bug report.

Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 3 months ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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