168819 - Check for mail every x minutes - invalid setting is silently set to 0 and causes continuous biffing

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Account Configuration, defect)

Description

[Francesco De Francesco]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 MultiZilla/v1.1.18
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 (Mozilla 1.1)

Using Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings you can set, for every mail account, to
check for new messages every 'x' minutes. I set the "minutes" value to 2,5 (here
in Italy *comma* is used for decimal digits instead of dot) and after some
seconds I got my CPU fully loaded because Mozilla, not understanding the new
value, had reset the field to 0 (zero) and checked for mail every second.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch Mozilla Mail&News
2. Choose Edit -> Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings from the menubar
3. Choose an active account from the left column and select its Server settings
4. Enter a value like "2,5" (use *comma*, not a dot)

Actual Results:  
Mozilla zeroed the value and started checking for mail every second

Expected Results:  
Mozilla had to understand the value or to warn me not to use a bad-formed number.

If I use a dot, the decimal part gets cleared but the integer one is still used.
So, what if I enter "0.5"?

Comment 1

[Jerome Lacoste]

I can't check it from here. Seems like there are two distinct problems:
- one that invalid settings are set to 0 (the step taken once encountering the
failure). They should be set to the former value.
- the other one is internationalization related (the reason for the failure).
But I am not sure if this is a valid problem as the user uses the en-US locale.

I would change the subject to reflect the first problem.

  invalid 'check every' setting is silently set to 0 and causes infinite loop

[Unfortunately I can't. I don't understand I thought that answering to the mail
I had received from James Cox telling me I would be given more rights would
allow me to do so. Anyway.]

Perhaps a second bug needs to be spawned if the second problme is valid and not
already reported.

Comment 2

[Francesco De Francesco]

replying to J. Lacoste (Comment #1):
you're right on the target: it seems they are two distinct bugs. A good (and
pretty simple) workaround might be a /warning/ about the badly formed number;
what do you think about?

Comment 3

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

I think this should be well enough covered by bug 25473 (has a patch from
December 2000...)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 25473 ***

Comment 4

[Francesco De Francesco]

what about the comma (i10n) issue? I'm gonna reopen the bug or perhaps open a
new, more specifical one if I won't get reply.

thank you
Francesco

Comment 5

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

Oh, bug 25473 comment 5 claims to have fixed the continuous biffing issue (or
maybe giving an invalid setting other than '0' is different, even though it
appears as '0' later?), and the rest is just ui stuff. Reopening this, marking
regression. I was able to cause what seemed like continuous biffing
(overlapping, even), on linux trunk cvs 2002-09-15, but can't get it to happen
reliably.

Comment 6

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

confirming, resummarizing. About the localization issue - if parseInt was used
on the input afaik it would be truncated the same way regardless of what was
used as decimal separator

Comment 7

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

Ok, what happens when I set '0' or 'goat' or such value for biff interval:
initially, afteropening mailnews, it seems to wait some minutes (10?) before
checking; but when it does biff, it does so repeatedly, very fast (my mail
server gives "[IN-USE] Unable to lock maildrop" b/c moz apparently tries to biff
the acct many times simultaneously).

Comment 8

[Francesco De Francesco]

in reply to T. Tolvanen's Comment #5 (I was writing this while you resummarized):
what can I say? I checked out bug 25473 and all its comments; if I actually
enter '0' moz doesn't perform a check per second even if the UI still shows a 0
in the textfield (and if x<=0 is not accepted as a legal value this _shouldn't_
happen), but if I enter a bad formed value, it *does*. moz actually checks for
mail every second! therefore, I think *this* bug is still valid and, I say more,
it's not related to 25473 since it solves that particular problem while this is
more complex than that (as J. Lacoste highlighted in Comment #1, this problem is
splitted in two parts). it shouldn't be hard to fix, but it may be very
dangerous (if you don't kill Mozilla *very* soon, the machine may hang causing
data loss and so on)

Comment 9

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

mass re-assign.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

fails as described in v1.1.
however, non-numeric characters are not permitted in v2.
with interval at 0, I don't see continuous biff
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081226 SeaMonkey/2.0a3pre