226836 - Selecting message in mail list causes crash: suspected cause is Winmail.dat attachement

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Andy Ozment]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031021
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4a (20031121)

I have an email that causes a crash whenever I try to open it on Linux with:
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4a (20031121)
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4a (20031112)

It does not cause a crash on any of the recent release / nightly versions of
Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey). None of these versions crash:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031009
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031021
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031119

I am attaching the file. I have deleted all of the text from the message, so I
am fairly certain that the Winmail.dat file (or how outlook describes its mime
type) is causing the crash.

The only extension I have installed is:
Quick Reply 

I am also happy to forward you the email, if you like. If I forward it as an
attachement, it still causes the crash.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click on the appropriate folder
2. Select the message in the "Message List" (?) window
3. The program crashes (you never see any of the text of the message in the
preview window. It crashes before that point)

Actual Results:  
Crash.

Comment 1

[Andy Ozment]

Attachment: Email with Winmail.dat that causes crash

This is just the email message. Its in whatever format that unix mail
traditionally is. (I used Mutt to save it to its own folder. This is that
folder, which contains only that message.)

Comment 2

[adepali]

Although this looks like an ancient bug, I have a similar problem just now.
Thunderbird 0.6 works fine but today I reveived a message that crashes it
whenever I try to open or forward it. 
The message I receive right after the crash is:

/usr/local/thunderbird/run-mozilla.sh: line 451: 12437 Segmentation fault     
"$prog" ${1+"$@"}

I don't know if it has a winmail.dat attachment because I can't open it.
Actually I can't even delete it, it always crashes me!

Comment 3

[Jim Strickland]

The crashing from a winmail.dat file may be specific to Linux, but problems with
these files can occur in Thunderbird on any platform. Winmail.dat files are
created by users of Outlook 97/2000 who choose to send their emails in HTML or
Rich Text format. Only Outlook users can read these files. Even Outlook Express
users can't read them. The problem is that if the sender attaches a file to one
of these emails, it can't be read by Thunderbird.

There are some third party utilities that can decode these files to extract any
attachments from them. However, I feel that it would be much better if that
capability could be built into Thunderbird or a Thunderbird extension. Perhaps
these third part programs could provide some clues on how to achieve this. The
can be found at the following URL:

http://www.pchell.com/support/winmaildat.shtml

Comment 4

[OstGote!]

Support for MS-TNEF (winmail.dat) is bug 77811.

Comment 5

[Andy Ozment]

I am no longer using linux, so I can't test whether or not this bug still exists. However, on my mac, it does not cause a crash.

My current version: version 2.0.0.6 (20070728) on Mac OS 10.4.10.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Carsten, seems like this crash should be long gone .ever see this on *nix?

Comment 7

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Carsten, seems like this crash should be long gone .ever see this on *nix?
> 

no crash on Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7pre) Gecko/20070827 Thunderbird/2.0.0.7pre ID:2007082704 - since the reporter is no longer able to reproduce this crash, i close this bug as works for me. Feel free to reopen this bug if you crash with a latest release/build.