274585 - Sending message hangs Thunderbird and excessive ports in CLOSE_WAIT status

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Chris Marshall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Thunderbird Version 1.0 (20041206)

I have not been able to track down why this problem is occuring, but it is
consistent over time. I originally noticed the problem with version 0.93, and it
has continued with improvement in 1.0.

I am able to successfully work with Thunderbird for a couple hours, and I never
shut it down. At some point, I'll go to send an email and I will get the dialog
box  saying "Contacting SMTP Server" and it spins without success. Under version
1.0 I am able to cancel the dialog and return to the message; this is an
improvment over 0.93 where this incident would completely hang thunderbird. When
I cancel in 1.0, it says "The SMTP server could not be contacted ... check your
configuration ...."

I look at open ports with aports.exe, and there are four ESTABLISHED connections
and 48 CLOSE_WAIT connections. The CLOSE_WAIT connections definitely appear to
grow over time, are loopback between 1035 and various 3xxx series ports. The
ESTABLISHED connections, two are port 993 over the network, and the other two
are loopback between 3612 and 3613.

Quitting Thunderbird does not clear the SMTP send mail problem; only by killing
the process through aports.exe, then restarting Thunderbird. I am immediately
able to send mail through the affected accounts. Once sending mail has been
locked up, all accounts are affected, and multiple SMTP servers are configured
and used, and I rotate the default SMTP server without success.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
Create an email on any account. Attempt to send the mail after Thunderbird has
been open for a couple of hours (3-4). 
Actual Results:  
Sending mail will hang and never complete. Under 1.0, you can successfully
cancel the send attempt, save the email as draft, kill all proceses with
aports.exe, then restart thunderbird, call up the draft and send the email. It
will go through immediately.

Expected Results:  
The mail should have gone through immediately, as it often does until it locks
up. Once locked up only killing all background processes will restore functionality.

There is no error message leading up to the hang behavior. I'm running Windows
XP Whistler on an AMD 64 processor. I also sometimes use Aventail Connect and/or
Cisco VPN products. I will try to make notes to see if there is a pattern of
interaction between the programs, but I don't see an obvious connection at the
moment.

Comment 1

[Chris Marshall]

Attachment: First screenshot of aports.exe output showing open ports

Comment 2

[Chris Marshall]

Attachment: More lines below the scroll. Image overlaps at port 3622

Comment 3

[Chris Marshall]

Attachment: Screenshot of the SMTP connect error

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

993 would be imap ssl ports, right? SMTP would be port 25 for non ssl, and 465
for SSL. I have no idea what those other connections are used for, but I don't
know why tbird would be opening them. We open connections for imap, smtp, and
http if you display html web pages in your messages. Is it possible that your
VPN is simply unhappy because you have so many connections in the close_wait state?

Comment 5

[Chris Marshall]

I think I've discovered what the problem is, and I think it may be related to
Bug 243105.

As I said in the original bug report, I'm on a network, and I connect to two
other networks with Aventail and VPN. The reason that I can only get one SMTP
server to work is because that server happens to be one that is available
because of the VPN connection. The local network apparently is blocking 25 and
110, which is why I can't get to any other SMTP server (or POP server).

I think that the reason I lose connectivity to the one SMTP server after a
couple hours has something to do with the interaction between the Cisco VPN 
client and/or Thunderbird, and the need to reset the VPN connection.

(Scenario 1) If I leave Thunderbird up, and reset the VPN client, then I can
send the mail without closing Thunderbird. (Scenario 2) If I close Thunderbird,
and leave the VPN client up, sometimes it sends right away, and sometimes it
doesn't.

Also, in the Scenario 1, after sending the message successfully then sometimes
when it goes to copy the message to the SENT folder on the IMAP server, the
message copy hangs. It seems like it was able to reset with the SMTP server but
is having trouble re-connecting with the IMAP server. If I hit cancel, I don't
get another chance to save the email, I can't send it again, it just sits there
with the header fields greyed out until I exit. Should this be filed as a
different bug report?

The reason that I think that this is also related to 243105 is that I was able
to telnet to port 26 to one of the "non-working" smtp servers from the primary
network just as that report advised, so I'm going to do more testing and follow
up on that reports suggestions.

How should I proceed with the disposition of my original bug report?

Comment 6

[Chris Marshall]

I forgot to mention that when you exit the Composed-Sent-Yet-Unsaved email
Compose window that I was describing in the fifth paragraph above, it does hang
tbird on the exit and you have to end task to get past it.

Comment 7

[Chris Marshall]

Attachment: This is the error that first comes up when the VPN goes down