171128 - List of attachment is blank

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Attachments, defect)

Description

[Dapid Candra]

I am using IMAP account. I selected some messages then delete them. After that,
ALL message display blank list of attachment. I could not see the attachment
names, but opening the message in new windows will display the attachment list.

The workaround I took is closing the mail client and re-opening it.

Comment 1

[wkfx2003-bugzilla]

Reproduceable using 20021002 build on WinXP. Same for NEWS attachment.

Comment 2

[parish]

I am seeing this on Win2000  2002-10-10-15 but also a couple of nightlies prior
to this.

When I first noticed the problem it seemed to only be only e-mails that were the
problem, but now *all* are affected.

Like the reporter if I double click on a header so it opens in a new window then
the attachment list is shown. Also, if there are several attachments, enough to
make a scrollbar necessary, the scrollbar appears but the file list doesn't.
However, if I move the scrollbar then the list appears.

Comment 3

[Dapid Candra]

I am using 1.2b now. Not only on IMAP account, but POP3 account, too, now.

I found a new way to see attachments list (to make file names visible, I mean),
besides restarting the program or fully opening the messages; I have to look for
message that has many attachment so the the scrollbar appear on the list box,
and click on the scrollbar. Returning to mails with one attachment now reveal
the filename.

Comment 4

[parish]

I've been seeing this for over a month now on WinXP and 2K. The first time I saw
it the only mails that appeared to be affected were old ones sent/received using
old versions of Moz (0.9.x) but the problem disappeared when I installed a new
nightly. Since then I have seen it several times.

Like other posters I can fix it by restarting the mail client, or finding a mail
with many attachments and clicking the scrollbar in the attachments pane.

I haven't been able to identify a particular set of circumstances under which it
occurs and any attempt to track down a possible cause usually get thwarted
because once they are displaying correctly the problem may not reappear for
several days.

Comment 5

[Richard Thomas]

I am seeing this now on 20021126 on Win2K SP3 - it was working fine up until
yesterday, then boom .... attachment list now blank.  Happens in news as well,
not just mail.

Comment 6

[ts13878]

I'm seeing this bug in Mozilla 1.2.1 in both the Win98 and Linux builds. 
However, unlike the others, I haven't been able to find a way to view the
attachments in my 1.2.1 Mozilla (either Linux or Windows 98 OS version).  

Attempting to open the email in a new window only opened a blank window (nothing
in the new window in both Linux and Windows).

The only way that I could tell that the attachments were there was to open
Netscape 7.0 in windows(I haven't installed the Linux Version yet..I will by
this weekend to view the attachments though).  Windows Netscape would show the
attachments when I clicked on the email, however, even then the paper clip
attachment alert wouldn't show up until AFTER I clicked on that respective email
in Netscape.  Opening the email file in Mozilla afterwards preserved the
paperclip attachment indication, however, I still couldn't view these
attachments in Mozilla.

Comment 7

[eberry]

This might be the same as or related to Bug 183231

Comment 8

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 183231 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 183032 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 184248 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Maybe Seth or Cavin have cycles to work on this.  I see this too, with both IMAP
and POP3, and clicking on the scrollbars inside the attachment pane makes the
list come back.

Comment 12

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 184664 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 183709 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

This is a must-fix for Buffy.  Nominating.

Comment 15

[Harry Lu]

I met the same problem when I using 1.2a under win2k.
I am using 1.3a(Gecko/20021212) now, and this problem seemes go away.  Is there 
a patch?

Comment 16

[Keith Hui]

I would like to confirm the bug described in comment #6. I'm running Mozilla
1.21 under Win98SE, and there's no way I can see the mail attachment at all. The
attachment box doesn't show up on the right of the header as usual, and
double-clicking on the message only opens a blank window. This feature worked
okay in Mozilla 1.1 as far as I can tell.

Has a workaround been found?

Comment 17

[Rolan Yang]

Try moving abook.mab out of your personal profile directory (to somewhere else)
while mozilla is not running.

For a little more info, see 
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=186295

Comment 18

[Harry Tabak]

re: Additional Comment #17 From Rolan Yang  2002-12-24 06:54 
Removing abook.mab does the trick. A new abook.mab is created and the
attachments reappeared and seem to behave properly.  Putting back the old
abook.mab recreates the problem.  

The old abook.mab is huge -- 528KB. Looking at it with vim shows lots of garbage
that doesn't look like it belongs, such as extracts from html pages, email, and
binary!!!!  This stuff is probably uninitialized random disk data caused by
forcing the file size too large.  Is there anything that you want me to look for?

Comment 19

[Len Weisberg]

Thank you, thank you to Rolan Yang for breaking the logjam on this.
It has been driving me crazy for nearly a month.

My experience has been very much as described in comment 17 and 
comment 18 with one difference: 
   the corrupted file was NOT abook.mab, rather it was history.mab

Interestingly, my prefs.js has the line:
 user_pref("mail.collect_addressbook", "moz-abmdbdirectory://history.mab");
because I don't want addresses collected in my actual address-book.

I could see my attachments after EITHER removing the user_pref line,
OR removing history.mab

I think all of this points the finger squarely at the address-collection
functionality.  (Of course there is also the question as to why problems
in this area wreak such havoc with attachments.)

I am very relieved to be able to see attachments again, but I think
this is a rather serious problem.  Not only is seeing attachments an 
important part of the mail service, but missing rogue attachments could
have serious security implications.  Is "major" high enough severity?

Comment 20

[Harry Tabak]

As a follow up to Comment #18, I trimmed the excess garbage from the end of the
abook.mab file and this also restores normal operation. File size is reduced
from 528KB to 49KB. The ligit mab stuff is therefore OK.  My guess is that the
problem occurs because the file size is greater than expected.  Reading the file
somehow stores data beyond the end of an input buffer and clobbers unrelated
variables in the stack?

Comment 21

[Len Weisberg]

For another data point, as with comment 20, I was able to fix the problem
by trimming the binary garbage from the end of history.mab .  It may also
be interesting that in my case, these files are quite a bit smaller than
Harry's abook.mab file - only 14k with 2k of garbage.

Comment 22

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 177829 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 23

[Harry Lu]

My #15 comment is wrong. It works well for about half a month, now happens from
time to time. I am using 1.3a(Gecko/20021212).

Comment 24

[Jim Morash]

I, too, am suffering from this bug, and at first thought my attachments had all
been deleted. That would have been rather a bummer.

Like other commentors, closing and restarting the mail client fixes the problem.
I had a look in abook.mab and history.mab, but there didn't seem to be anything
too weird in there ("binary garbage").

IMAP on WinXP, Moz 1.2.1

Comment 25

[Samir Gehani]

Mail triage team: nsbeta1+/adt1

Comment 26

[R.K.Aa.]

*** Bug 189145 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 27

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 189592 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 28

[Cavin Song]

Reassign.

Comment 29

[Cavin Song]

I was able to see the problem today and it seems that the backend does fill in
the attachment info correctly but the UI just does not display the list (ie,
empty). A screen shot is coming.

Comment 30

[Cavin Song]

Attachment: Showing empty list display and backend fills in the attachment info

The attachment list info (7 of them) in the Command Prompt shows that the
backend does fill in the correct info but the front-end still shows an empty
attachment list.

Comment 31

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

I've seen this with messages with just one attachment, too.

I can get the one attachment to show by clicking in the attachment tree and 
then using the mousewheel.

Comment 32

[Greg]

I have had this problem for 2 weeks, but the attachment window did not even show
up. I only knew that there was an attachment due to the text of the message. The
Deletion of the abook.mab file did the trick, mine was 64K. I also don't save my
email address into the default book.

(Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212

Comment 33

[Jan Varga [:janv]]

taking

Comment 34

[Jan Varga [:janv]]

Attachment: proposed fix

GetFirstItemBox() was failing because mCurrentIndex was set to -1.
I fixed the case when mCurrentIndex was set to -1.

Comment 35

[Jan Varga [:janv]]

Joe says "sure, that makes sense"
Cavin, could you just test this patch in your tree ?
Seth, could you sr ?
Thanks

Comment 36

[Cavin Song]

Comment on attachment 114611 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

r=cavin. Does work for me. Maybe you want to use -uw option for the diff next
time.

Comment 37

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

jan, thanks for working on this.

with your fix, we'll have:

    if (siblingIndex >= 0 && siblingIndex-1 < mCurrentIndex) {
      --mCurrentIndex;
      mYPosition = mCurrentIndex*mRowHeight;
      VerticalScroll(mYPosition);
    }

For this bug, it looks like mCurrentIndex was 0 and siblingIndex was 1.

if mCurrentIndex was 0 and siblingIndex was 0, we'd hit the bug again, right?

is it possible for siblingIndex to be 0?

2)

I don't know this code, but is there any reason why we'd want to scroll even if
mCurrentIndex didn't change?  (Probably not.)

what about:

    if (siblingIndex >= 0 && siblingIndex-1 <= mCurrentIndex) {
      if (mCurrentIndex > 0)
        --mCurrentIndex;
      mYPosition = mCurrentIndex*mRowHeight;
      VerticalScroll(mYPosition);
    }

Comment 38

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

Comment on attachment 114611 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

since this is code he wrote, I think we still want hewitt's review

Comment 39

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

this has r=cavin

Comment 40

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

Comment on attachment 114611 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

jan says this has r=hewitt.

sr=sspitzer

seeking approval for 1.3 final

Comment 41

[Jan Varga [:janv]]

The case where both mCurrentIndex and sinblingIndex are 0 should not happen.
But I'll add there an assertion to catch it next time.

if (siblingIndex >= 0 && siblingIndex-1 < mCurrentIndex) {
  NS_PRECONDITION(mCurrentIndex > 0, "mCurrentIndex > 0");
  --mCurrentIndex;
  mYPosition = mCurrentIndex*mRowHeight;
  VerticalScroll(mYPosition);
}

Comment 42

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

sounds good, thanks jan.

Comment 43

[R.K.Aa.]

*** Bug 193665 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 44

[Jan Varga [:janv]]

checked in

Comment 45

[Ninoschka Baca]

Trunk build 2003-03-07: Mac 10.1.5, WinXP
Verified Fixed. Created/sent/retreived a message with 7 attachments, selected
the message, switched to another folder, then back to the original folder to
select the message and all attachments are present.

Comment 46

[alandungeon]

Just downloaded release version of 1.3 after uninstalling 1.2.1.  My history is
identical to that related in comment #6 on Windows 98, 2nd edition, but ...

The problem *continues* to persist -- no attachments shown on incoming messages,
and a blank window shows when attempting to Open Message in New Window.  POP3
earthlink account.

Moreover:  I haven't successfully seen any attachment on an email since January.
 When using the message filter to show only Inbox messages that "Has [sic]
Attachments", I get a list of messages that end in January at the point in which
the problem began.  When I attempt to see the attachments for these messages, I
can read the body, but cannot see any evidence of an attachment.

NOTE:  My test messages -- including 7-10 attached files -- are NOT recognized
as being messages with attachments (and therefore fail the view filter).

One of my test messages exceeded the max downloadable size I had set... clearly
the attachments are actually being sent, for I clicked on the option to
"download the rest" of the message, and it did.  Nonetheless, I see no iconic
evidence that an attachment exists.

After installing 1.3, I tried the new mail tool - it failed as above.  I
rebooted, then tried again.  Same behavior.  Every time; consistently.  I have
not found a work-around... have tried every cogent 

Comment 47

[alandungeon]

[forgot to finish this line] "... have tried every cogent work-around in the
comment history."

Comment 48

[alandungeon]

Follow-up to #46 & #47:  REPORTING A SUCCESSFUL WORK-AROUND
Many yhanks to Ivo Bloechliger for this.  Here's the complete procedure:

1. Install Mozilla 1.3
2. Find "abook.mab".  Delete every copy found.
3. Exit Mozilla completely.
4. Restart.  abook.mab will be re-created, but that's okay.
5. All problems detailed in #46 went away.

Ivo reports:  "I don't know what this file is for, but I don't miss it, except
that the junk mail filter does not work anymore, which is a lesser issue."

I haven't checked the junk mail filter out yet, but I certainly agree:  it's a
lesser issue.  Got have the attachments -- and they are indeed back.

Cheers, Alan