269772 - mail crashes when previewing a huge image

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Jens Lorenz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.3; Linux; X11; x86_64) (KHTML, like Gecko)
Build Identifier: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.7.3/mozilla-win32-1.7.3-installer.exe

I recently created a huge image (100000x30000 px) with the gimp. As it was only b/w I saved it as 
PNG in order to sent it home via email (the file size was ca. 3.4 megabytes). I was really suprised, 
when Mozilla-Mail would fetch the mailbox contents but then just stopped responding and started 
swapping like mad. 
 
It took some time to figure what was going on, until I remembered sending myself this image. 
Apparently the integrated image preview _really_ tried to preview it. I had to hand-edit the mbox file to 
delete the email and extract the file via mutt in order to get the image (and edit it further via gimp). 
 
I would suggest that the integrated image preview of the mail client knows its limit and does not try 
to preview images beyond a certain size (this requires inspection of the image metadata without 
actually decompressing it). The maximum preview size should be reasonable in regard to the average 
hardware in use. 
 
I have found Bug #153621 which is somewhat related, but not exactly the same. 
 
I'm not sure if it's security related. There have been the well known mail bombs which exploit large 
compression ratios as well, but the mozilla.org security policy does not mention denial of service 
conditions as security issues. User data loss should not occur to someone immediately but could be 
observed as such to the unknowing user and become real when trying to fix it without knowing really 
what to do. Because of this I'm marking it as security related anyway. Feel free to remove if this is 
not justified. 
 
I will upload an example png file with 20000x20000 black pixels. Be careful which image viewer to 
feed it to. I only know of netpbm and gimp which handle these huge images with the help of a fast 
harddisk. 
 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Take the provided image as sent it to yourself as attachement 
2. Configure your mail client to automatically preview attached images 
3. Fetch your new mails and read the mail 
 
Actual Results:  
Mozilla-Mail stops responding and starts swapping like mad. 

Expected Results:  
It should not try to preview this image, but all others which it is able to handle.

Comment 1

[Jens Lorenz]

Attachment: 20000x20000 png image file (all black)

Comment 2

[timeless]

wfm 2004111805 w32 i'm going to declassify this bug unless someone can show some
indication that it is remotely interesting.

reporter: since you're using windows, you should have gotten a talkback dialog
if it truly crashed, please run components\talkback.exe and copy the incident id.

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
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
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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.