186912 - IMAP login failures result in uninformative message popup, useful message from server not shown

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Neal Ziring]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

When connecting to an IMAP server during login, a wide variety of failures are
possible: wrong password, wrong account name, account locked out, account
expired, etc.  The IMAP protocol includes a field for the server to send an
error message, but Mozilla 1.2.1 seems to be discarding that field.  When I
am unable to connect to my IMAP server, I always get the same popup message:
"Login to server server1 failed."  It would be nice to see the 
response text from the IMAP server.   (Sure, you can see the response text
by sniffing the traffic with Ethereal or some other sniffer tool, but
some users won't want to do that.) 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start up Mozilla, then start MailNews.
2. Click on "Get Msgs" button in toolbar.
3. Supply incorrect password for IMAP account.


Actual Results:  
An Alert box popped up with the message
"Login to server ming failed.".

Expected Results:  
An Alert box should have popped up with a more informative message,
like:
"Login to server ming failed.
(Server message: 'Logon failure 
unknown user name or bad password')

The IMAP server in this case was MS Exchange 2000, but I have observed
the same behavior with Mozilla 1.1 and the UW IMAP server.

To test this further, I set up different kinds of problems:
an expired account and an account locked out.  The server
sent different messages in the Response part of the IMAP
message, but Mozilla always showed the same Alert message.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 2

[Neal Ziring]

I've just re-confirmed this bug in Mozilla 1.7.12.  It is still there.
The key issue seems to occur when Mozilla sends an IMAP request with 
the following format  232,244:245
in a request that looks like this:

4 UID fetch 232,244:245 (UID RFC822.SIZE FLAGS BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (From To
Cc Subject Date Message-ID Priority X-Priority References Newsgroups In-Reply-To)])

and the response from MS Exchange 2000 is:

4 NO Unrecognized internal error: 0x8004011b


However, when I've tried sending some manual tests, it is always numbers higher
than 244 that seem to trigger the problem.  Therefore, it seems that the problem
is probably exclusively at the Exchange end of things.  Possibly the file on
the server is corrupted at that position.

I guess this bug can be dropped.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

ok, thx.