189733 - Crashes all Mozilla when mail message is missing charset info

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Jay Smith]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202

When scrollbar to right of upper right mail pane (listing of mail headers), is
scrolled too fast or sloppily, all Mozilla crashes.  I admit it, I sometimes go
too fast. Drag scrollbar down, oops missed the item I wanted, drag scrollbar
back up. Or click, drag, click again, drag some more or back up --- maybe (??)
some of those clicks or drags are falling of the right edge or in the crack on
the left between the scroll bar and the pane??  It all happens too fast to be
sure. Call me a scrollbar slob.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Drag upper right mail pane scrollbar up or down and back again. Sometimes,
click and drag, click and drag, sometimes just reverse direction. Possible that
the mouse pointer is getting off either the left or right side of the scrollbar
-- it really varies.
2. Crash all open Mozilla windows.
3. Restart Mozilla and keep fingers crossed (and scroll more carefully).
Actual Results:  
All Mozilla crashes.

Expected Results:  
Not crashed.

I am using LINUX Red Hat 8 Mozilla 1.2, viewing on a Windows 95 PC.  I have
experimented (we are in the middle of migrating to RH 8) with THREE DIFFERENT
methods of getting at the Linux/Mozilla from this PC: 
  PC-based X servers
    SCO's PC Xvision 7.3
    Cygwin XFree86 4.2
  VNC: RealVNC 3.3.6 for Win32

The Cygwin & VNC are downloaded in just the last few days.  The Xvision is ancient.

NOTE: Because the VNC is not a local (Windows 95) X server, that suggests that
the problem is not specifically a Windows 95 X server problem.  In fact, I think
I have had more crash problems using the VNC than the others -- but all three
have crashed in this way.

This could be a Windows 95 resources/leak issue. Or an interaction involving the
latency of the network, etc.  However, problems of this type hardly ever occured
using older programs and Netscape 4.76 for LINUX on this same machine, but all
was via the Xvision back then.

This machine has a Matrox Millennium AGP 200 (MGA 200) graphics card with 8 MB
of memory.

Let me know if you need mor information.

Comment 1

[Jay Smith]

Attachment: The email missing charset

Comment 2

[Jay Smith]

CHANGE IN "STORY", but still SEVERE.

Sorry, I feel like doofus. I started being _really_ careful on the scroll bar
and the crashes kept happening. I finally narrowed the problem to an area of 10
emails and slowly weeded them down to one problem email.

The problem is VERY SIMPLE, BUT VERY SEVERE: Missing "charset" 

It said only:  text/plain
When it should have said something like:
   text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

However, this was enough to crash all of Mozilla, while I scrolled through the
list of headers -- not even "opening" that email.

By the way, the email was a programatically generated response (from the
software company that makes WS FTP)!!! They should know better.

The email was just fine when viewed on my old Netscape 4.76 running on Red Hat
Linux 6.x.

They had another problem, but it does not crash the email. They added a case
number to the subject line, but put in some invisible character (cr, newline,
tab ??) in front of it.  

Their faulty email is attached.

I hope that the program can supply some default in the case of a missing charset. 

Comment 3

[Jay Smith]

The person with appropriate authority/access should reword/rename the
subject/title/summary of this bug.  Sorry for thinking in the wrong direction
first time around.

Comment 4

[Andrew Schultz]

worksforme with linux trunk 20030119 and 1.2.1.  viewed the message just in the
list of headers and even displayed the message fine.

as reporter, you have authority to change the bug fields...

Comment 5

[Jay Smith]

Original reporter setting to WORKSFORME at request of Wayne S. Mery email of today.

I no longer use the version that had exhibited the problem and I have had no
problems since with newer versions (I now use Mozilla 1.7.3).

Jay