203045 - Trying to reopen IMAP connection

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Meik Langwald]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401

The context: 

When I'm at a customer site, I can read my company email through a small applet,
providing some kind of IMAP proxy. (For a MUA like Mozilla Mail my IMAP Mailbox
is on localhost, port 9143. On this port listens the applet, forwarding all
requests to the remote, secured server)

This proxy seems to terminate connections after some time, (Rating the error
messages from mozilla, there seems to be a connection for each and every folder.
Is this right?) and Mozilla has problems to recover from this closed connections
in some situations. 

If I write a mail (and Mozilla wants to save in in the Sent folder after
sending) or move a mail to an other folder, I often get a error message because
of such a timeout. From my point of view Mozilla still thinks to have an open
connection to that folder and fails because of the timeout in the meantime. 

The code for reading emails seems to be much more robust. Advancing to the next
unread message in the same folder after some time, don't generate an error, but
Mozilla reconnects to that folder and shows the unread email. Even if there is a
small, awaited delay. 

So my wish would be similar robust code (maybe reusing the robust code for
reading emails?) when mozilla thinks to have an open connection to an IMAP
folder and fails because of a timeout in the meantime for these two situations:
 
- after mozilla sent an email and wants to store a copy in the Sent folder on
the IMAP server
- when mozilla wants to move/copy an email to another IMAP folder.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Difficult. I can see this problem only when I use a propriety, company internal
IMAP proxy. 

1. click on a IMAP folder to see a list of emails, read an email
2. switch to another folder (perferably IMAP, too), rean an email there
3. wait some time (I think the timeout is 5 to 15 minutes here)
4. drag an email from the second folder to the first folder. 
5. An error message appears
6. Retrying to move the email (step 4) is successfull

Actual Results:  
After step 4 a message box with an error (Something like "Cannot move message to
IMAP folder, because the servere closed the connection.") appears. 

After this error message, Mozilla can reconnect to that folder. 


Expected Results:  
Don't show an error message, but reconnect to that IMAP folder. 

I watched this misbehaviour of Mozilla Mail the first time with Mozilla 1.2.1. I
don't know, if earlier versions work different, but I don't think so. I watched
this problem not only with Mozilla for Windows, but also with the Linux version.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

dupe of bug 147204 ?

Comment 2

[Meik Langwald]

Don't know. Sounds familiar, but with two little differences: 
I get an error message and I don't have to restart mozilla. Retrying the
operation (open folder, save sent mail) works. 

I think, there is some kind of caching of open connections inside the IMAP code:
if a cached connection times out, this produces an error. A better behavior
would be to silently detect the close and reopen the connection. 

I took a look at the IMAP source, but I'm not deep enough into Mozilla and C++
to get any resuls. 

Comment 3

[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.

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Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.