1786173 - Incorrect pop3 server setting should not cause TB to be unresponsive.

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: POP, defect)

Description

[ISHIKAWA, Chiaki]

Windows10
TB 102.1.2

I have experienced a broken mail server setup caused by the failure to correctly carry over the old mail server set up somehow.

I noticed a apparent hung of TB while it probably experienced a network timeout.
This is bad. The main GUI should always remain responsive as much as possible.
In my case, after the update, the TB main window became unresponsive for a while and I thought update failed. (Indeed it failed to carry over correct Mail storage directory and others.)

I can easily re-create this apparent hung symptom by
intentionally append "xxx." before the pop3 mail server name in account setting
and restart TB.

Once TB comes back, and if I want to enter the setup tab which is still visible, I cannot and see the TB window pain show "not responding" for a while.

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1786120 +++

This may be one of those bugs which only happens once during upgrade process.

I upgraded from 93? series to 102.1.2 finally (the upgrade button appears in the last day or so).

There are a few things that bothered me during upgrade and so I am listing them here.
One of them, the failure to correctly carry over the mail storage directory was most disturbing.
I have specified the Mail storage directory NOT under the profile directory because , for various reasons, I need to store a lot of e-mails for the last dozen years or so.

Factors that bothered me after the upgrade and restart.

• There is a server that does not support encrypted connection.
  But I let the encrypted negotiation (I think that TB tried it first and then went on to connect unencrypted). It used to work without a hitch.
  With 102.1.2, TB almost got hung after it says, one of the servers did not support TLS conenction? (sorry I failed to capture the screen).
  As soon as TB came back to life, I changed the setting of the server to try plain text connection only.
• The Mail directory is carried over from the old setting incorrectly.
  See that attached. Note the strange prefix of "C:\Users\ci". There is an incorrect logic somewhere in the installer. This is VERY BAD obviously. I got greeted with almost empty mail directorys, which made sweat run down my spine. Because the failure in upgrading wiped out my whole mail directory (!?).
• There is another issue. I realized the incorrect setting of mail storage directory eventually after a couple of restarting TB.
  But each time I tried to shutdown TB, I got the warning from TB stating something like
  "There is a problem with spam handling setting for [e-mail]. Check before saving the profile."
  Well, at least during one of the trials, I never intended to save the profile.
  AND this dialog could not be eliminated. No matter if I checked cancel, it came back repeatedly.

Hmm...

So I changed my setting to save junk file to a junk folder, but probably it is incorrect.
It probably pointed to a non-existing folder name (maybe prefixed by the wrong c:\users\ci prefix as in the original folder.?"
Sorry I already fixed the issue and do not know what the incorrectly folder name was.

So I have a bitter feeling that the my account setting is probably messed up one way or the other, which I will find out over the next week or so when something does not work as it used to do. :-(

Comment 1

[ISHIKAWA, Chiaki]

I am not even sure if the update process this time around picked up the correct profile. Oh well.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Tried this, but seems WFM.

If I shut down tb, edited prefs.js to have mail.server.server1.hostname point to something wrong, I do get some trouble with the "The Junk settings on account "foo@bar" have a possible problem the next time I go to edit that server hostname in the settings. This is ultimately because nsSpamSettings::Initialize triggers nsSpamSettings::GetSpamFolderURI which can't find the incoming server.
I'm not sure there's anything much to fix about that, since one shouldn't edit prefs manually that way (not to bad values, and not to incomplete combinations)

Comment 3

[ISHIKAWA, Chiaki]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #2)
... [omissio] ...

I'm not sure there's anything much to fix about that, since one shouldn't edit prefs manually that way (not to bad values, and not to incomplete combinations)

I agree that one should not edit pref.js.

Problem was that it was TB 102 updater or TB itself that screws up the pref setting to incorrect combination.
That was not on my part. I had never edited pref.js on my windows PC. (I did on a linux PC for testing purposes for my patches for TB).

Because of this issue, I could not touch TB at all while some kind of timeout was waited upon.
Because windows PC at home is used for REAL WORLD messages,
the obvious hung really left me very uneasy since I could sense that update probably failed in a very bad manner (and it did).