267448 - POP3 connection hangs forever in case of IP connectivity problems

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Networking: POP, defect)

Description

[Sergey Ignatchenko]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

In cases of poor connectivity between client and POP3 server Mozilla can hang
forever. If it is caused by hanged TCP session, it can be easily corrected by
setting SO_KEEPALIVE on the socket (default 2 hours is still better than
forever). Another option would be to use select and detect connection inactivity
for X minutes then forcing disconnect. If such a mechanism (either SO_KEEPALIVE
or selct) already exists, then the problem observed is not related to TCP and
the reason is different and unknown. 


Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get disconnected during POP3 session w/o causing client OS to reset
connection (i.e. plugging out cable from client machine usually won't work). 
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Mozilla mail works but TCP connection is still there and POP3 session is
considered active, so effectively there is no way to get mail until Mozilla is
closed (e.g. 'Get Msgs' doesn't work). 

Expected Results:  
Detect disconnect on some timeout and re-establish connection.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

I checked in a fix for this a while ago - please try a 1.8 build. I might check
it into the 1.7.x branch as well...

Comment 2

[Sergey Ignatchenko]

Re. trying 1.8 build: sorry, I'm not brave enough to try Alphas. Not really a
very big issue, so if it will be fixed in 1.8, it's IMO Ok. I'll try it when 1.8
will be released and will re-open bug if it won't help.