Closed Bug 235125 Opened 21 years ago Closed 20 years ago

Can not receive mail - folder is processing - for four days now.

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Mail Window Front End
Platform:
x86
Windows XP
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
critical

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: daniel.koch, Assigned: mscott)

References

Details

Attachments

(1 file)

blocking e-mail
30.78 KB, application/zip
Details 
User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

When I try to get mail, this error message appears:
"This folder is being processed. Please wait until processing is comlpete to get
mail." It's been processing for four days now. I have removed Thunderbird,
re-installed it, shut down the computer. Nothing has helped so far.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Press get mail button.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Get error message.

Expected Results:  
Get my email.

Would this have anything to do with junk mail filters?
Confirming as per several complaints by users running Win98 as well as XP. Will
try to direct them to this bug for comments.

Reporter: Your UA that you entered is for Firefox, not Thunderbird. Please list
your T'Bird UA.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
I'm having this problem with comcast servers on mozilla 1.7a.  poptray has been
suggested as a solution, another user has diagnosed this as:

I've been having the same problem with Comcast for the last several months.    I
don't think it's a Mozilla problem.  It seems to be the result of badly
formatted spam on the Comcast mail server.  When the download frezeup happens,
it also happens using Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express 2003.  To clear it, I
have to go to the Comcast Web mail site and clear the spam from among the real
messages.  Then the mail downloads to Mozilla (or the others) without a problem
until the next time.

Not every spam message causes the problem.  I've managed to identify specific
ones that do, and they all have a line in their message source headers:
"X-Comment: Sending client does not conform to RFC822 minimum requirements."  So
do some of the other "non-problem" spam messages, but none of the legitimate
messages do.  So I'm guessing the hang up problem is with the Comcast mail
server software.  It's like a Denial-of-Service attack, and it's been increasing
to three of four times a day.  It's more than a little annoying.  Maybe someone
having better knowledge of message formatting and server software than I can
shed more light on the problem.  I've been on the phone repeatedly with Comcast,
but so far haven't had any results or feedback on progress.  If you're using
Comcast as your ISP, it might help calling them and putting some emphasis on the
subject. 
(In reply to comment #2)
> I'm having this problem with comcast servers on mozilla 1.7a.  poptray has been
> suggested as a solution, another user has diagnosed this as:
> 
> I've been having the same problem with Comcast for the last several months.    I
> don't think it's a Mozilla problem.  It seems to be the result of badly
> formatted spam on the Comcast mail server.  When the download frezeup happens,
> it also happens using Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express 2003.  To clear it, I
> have to go to the Comcast Web mail site and clear the spam from among the real
> messages.  Then the mail downloads to Mozilla (or the others) without a problem
> until the next time.
> 
> Not every spam message causes the problem.  I've managed to identify specific
> ones that do, and they all have a line in their message source headers:
> "X-Comment: Sending client does not conform to RFC822 minimum requirements."  So
> do some of the other "non-problem" spam messages, but none of the legitimate
> messages do.  So I'm guessing the hang up problem is with the Comcast mail
> server software.  It's like a Denial-of-Service attack, and it's been increasing
> to three of four times a day.  It's more than a little annoying.  Maybe someone
> having better knowledge of message formatting and server software than I can
> shed more light on the problem.  I've been on the phone repeatedly with Comcast,
> but so far haven't had any results or feedback on progress.  If you're using
> Comcast as your ISP, it might help calling them and putting some emphasis on the
> subject. 


Same thing here except I have not been able to actually view one of these
messages.  I go to the web mail site and find a message with something like
"Unidentified sender" in the Sender field and a blank in the Subject field. 
Deleting that message always has fixed the problem for me.

I'd love to be able to actually download one of those messages and examine it.


I am seeing the same problem and I am currently on Comcast ISP.  However, my
email account is not through Comcast.  Should I still be seeing this problem? 
Any other advice?  Thanks.
To restate my earlier comment in a more understandable way.

I have an account through my school's webmail (@hope.edu).  Currently I am
studying in Washington D.C. and have Comcast as my ISP.  Until about a week and
a half ago, things were working fine.  Then all of a sudden, Tb stopped
downloading email messages due to the bug mentioned here.  I can log into my
webmail account on the Comcast ISP and get my messages.  Tb cannot.  

Tb at work is not having a problem downloading messages - so I know it has
something to do with the ISP.  I will check tonight if my account works with OE,
just to know if it is a Tb only problem or if it happens with any program
working with Comcast.
Well as suddenly as this problem came on a couple days ago, is as sudden as it
went away for me.  It appears that Comcast fixed the problem because I have been
downloading my messages today without problems.  I wonder if Dan, George, Ed,
and anyone else that has had this problem has seen it go away.  For me it has.
(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       
> Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6)
Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
> 
> When I try to get mail, this error message appears:
> "This folder is being processed. Please wait until processing is comlpete to get
> mail." It's been processing for four days now. I have removed Thunderbird,
> re-installed it, shut down the computer. Nothing has helped so far.
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Press get mail button.
> 2.
> 3.
> 
> Actual Results:  
> Get error message.
> 
> Expected Results:  
> Get my email.
> 
> Would this have anything to do with junk mail filters?

(In reply to comment #6)
> Well as suddenly as this problem came on a couple days ago, is as sudden as it
> went away for me.  It appears that Comcast fixed the problem because I have been
> downloading my messages today without problems.  I wonder if Dan, George, Ed,
> and anyone else that has had this problem has seen it go away.  For me it has.

Now I'm stuck with this problem several times per day. If I close and re-open
all's well (usually). Only once I've had to login to comcast to clear the
problem mail. I've read the forums and done all the suggested stuff with NAV but
I can't seem to eliminate the problem. Axiously awaiting the fix.
This was not corrected as of a nitely build a week ago.

I also see these emails about 4 times per day. I need to use a separate email
client to clear the problem by deleteing the offending email.

It would be great if this could be resolved before 0.6 is released.
I also have this problem - pretty much daily, but then I get a lot of spam and
viruses sent to me.  I'm using TB 0.6 released edition, but I'm not on Comcast
(not even heard of them).  My ISP is Virgin.net, but e-mail is provided through
joshuainternet.com.  It seems to jam always on e-mails containing viruses (I'm
using NAV 2003 to scan incoming e-mails).  Logging onto webmail to clear the
offending e-mail works - but is annoying.
This bug is beginning to really annoy me - I'm having to log into my webmail
every day to clear at least one blocking e-mail.  It seems usually to be an
e-mail claiming to be a failed delivery with a virus attached.  I'm using Norton
Antivirus to scan e-mails on the POP port.  Has anyone any thoughts on a
work-around?
This bug is also causing huge problems for me recently.

I have noticed this bug for several Thunderbird versions, but it wasn't annoying
until very recently. Now for the past week it seems like every day I have to
logon to the e-mail server's webmail and delete an email with the From line
saying &nsbp; in order to actually download my mail.

I just did a post on the MozillaZine forums and found something that may help
for those of you who use Norton Antivirus out there (such as myself). You can
disable that confirmation popup that comes up when Norton cleans a virus from
your e-mail.

To disable the pop-up:

Open NAV
Click Options
Click Email in the panel on the left
Select either
Repair then silently quarantine if unsuccessful
or
Repair then silently delete if unsuccessful
under How to respond when a virus is found in the panel on the right.

This is for NAV 2003, not sure about other versions.

I just tried this fix, so I am unsure if it fixes my problem right now. Will let
everyone know ASAP.

Clearly the junk mail with bad headers issue needs to be fixed. No other e-mail
client that I have tried out has had this issue.
Does somebody who is seeing this have an IMAP account?

If so, could you og in via IMAP and see what the message is actually like?
Instructions available on request. :)
does anyone have a sample message to reproduce this?
perhaps a pop3 protocol log would be helpful:

http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html#pop3

I know Christian fixed a problem or two that had this same symptom...
I don't know if David Cornish or Chris Gonyea see the "folder being processed".
And even if it very much looks like the problem is triggered by NAV (again see
http://www.eyrich-net.org/mozilla/mozvsav.html item 3 and 4).

On the issue of "folder being processed" I wrote something in bug 240969,
comment #2. Though I think there are multiple causing this.
As you wrote, a protocol would be nice to see what happens here.
Since I followed the advice above about NAV, I don't see it very much any more,
but it still ocassionally occurs.  It is always however a virus e-mail which
triggers it. 
If it's what I'm writing on my page, it's a virus e-mail triggering a failure in
NAV causing trouble in Mozilla.
Both situations (connection going away and connection canceled by user) IMHO
suffer from not releasing the folder lock as I wrote in the other bug.
Here is the message source of an e-mail that caused the "Folders processing"
dialog to come up.

Return-Path: <zxjgopa@msn.com>
Delivered-To: 199-chris@chrisgonyea.com
Received: (qmail 25451 invoked from network); 28 May 2004 19:03:06 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO 8) (80.96.34.178)
  by web2.risingnet.net with SMTP; 28 May 2004 19:03:06 -0000
Received: from 80.220.104.127 by 80.96.34.178; Fri, 28 May 2004 21:00:08 +0100
Message-ID: <Z[20

Yes, that is the end of the message source, that <Z[20 part. Several of them do
appear in my e-mail inbox (at least they do when I look at them in webmail).
I receive some of these emails with truncated headers too (see bug 244722).
Since I use IMAP, all that happens if I get one of is that the junk mail filter
can't move spam automatically any more until I restart the app.

I think the root cause might be the same as bug 244722, i.e. a message truncated
in the header part causes severe grief.

I looked into the MIME parsing code, but it's a bit hard to understand. I think
the problem is that MimeMessage_parse_line (and thus MimeHeaders_parse_line)
doesn't work on the whole message but is only called on one line at a time. So
if it never gets a blank line everything just grinds to a halt: the caller has
fed the MIME parser everything and expects something to happen, and the MIME
parser just sits there waiting for a blank line indicating that the headers are
finished.

I think that a possible fix might be to modify the function that parses mail
messages so that it inserts a single newline at the end if there is no empty
line anywhere in the message. This should be pretty safe: a message without at
least one empty line is already horked, since there's no separation between
headers and body, so we can do anything we like to it.

But I haven't found out where in the code Mime_parse_line is called from.

Thoughts?
I have a feeling this is partially related to certain server software.  But
can't figure out what the whole sinareo is.

I'm going to see if I can investigate and find the common link between people
who had this.  I know a few.
Christian, if I understand you correctly, the Mozilla fix for this would be to
add a timeout in our pop3 download code. Ideally, we would just get a timeout
notification from necko when we'd been waiting for data for longer than XX
seconds (probably, an OnStopRequest with a status of NS_ERROR_NET_TIMEOUT).  See
also http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189363

However, we might need to do this ourselves for a couple reasons, one being that
Darin is busy, the other is that in our situation, necko might think everything
is cool - the socket is alive, etc, but the pop3 protocol code is just waiting
for data the server is never going to send. What we really want is a timeout
when we're waiting for data and the server hasn't sent any data for > XX seconds.
Even if we add this timeout code the pop3 protocol code (which I think would be
pretty easy - just set the timer in nsPop3Protocol::WaitForResponse when we
don't have any data, clear it when we get OnDataAvailable and when we're done
running a url), we still have to decide what to do when it appears that the
server hasn't given us all the data we asked for - do we just advance to the
next message? Do we ask the user what to do (which will break unattended
download on biff)? We could put the timeout code in nsPop3Protocol::RetrResponse
if we just want to handle this problem when retrieving messages...
Having a timeout for POP3 code would be nice, yes. There are quite a few bugs on
this.
A timeout code could help to save the click on Stop or even to jump over the
hanging mail (but beware of slow servers, so the value needs to be adjustable).

But I don't know how it could help use here since I still don't see the reason
for Mozilla coming up with "folder is being processed". From the other bug
mentioned I know the lock isn't cleared if the connection itself goes away
because the server disconnects.
But I can't produce that message if Mozilla waits endlessly for more data. The
user just needs to click "Stop" and continue.
Hmm... wouldn't it be a better solution to fix the MIME code so it doesn't choke
on messages such as the one in comment #18? That would seem to be the real cause
of the problem here...

And it would also fix bug 244722... ;-)))
Can someone who is seeing this try to see if it also if you apply the patch in
attachment 149627 [details] [diff] [review]? That fixes the truncated headers problem with IMAP, so it
might work here too.
Now that the patch for bug 244722 has been checked in, can someone who sees this
(Chris Gonyea?) check if it's still a problem? With luck it might be fixed.
Marking WORKSFORME based on lack of response. If someone still sees this with a
current build, please reopen.
Depends on: 244722
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 20 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
I've just got this again on the 20040608 build.

Have attached the e-mail to this bug.  It's in an encrypted ZIP file because it
contains a virus.  Password "bug235125".
Attached file blocking e-mail — 
note the password in my comment #48.
oops, I mean comment #28 :)
I can't open the file with winzip 7.0 (it says "requires PKUNZIP version 2.1 to
extract (WinZip supports up to version 2.0)").

Can you put it up in another format or send it to me via private email?
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.

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