282635 - POP3: Thunderbird seems to choose wrong AUTH method on certain servers

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(MailNews Core :: Networking: POP, defect)

Description

[Ariel Dembling]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Thunderbird build 20050215 (0.6+) and release 1.0

Thunderbird silently fails to download mail through POP3 under certain
conditions. It might be related to the CAPA response handling, since the failure
appears right after that. Only happens with certain servers, but on those
servers it is 100% repeatable.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
This bug appears or not depending to the POP3 server's response, so I can only
tell you what _I_ do:
1.Open Thunderbird
2.Get mail
3.It fails!

Actual Results:  
A message appears on the lowest panel: "Connect: Host contacted, sending login
information...". NO progress bar appears at all. No mail is downloaded. That's all.

Expected Results:  
Download all of the emails waiting in the POP3 server!

Of course, the POP3 account preferences are correctly configured and the correct
password is entered. Of course, this same POP3 account works just fine with
other POP3 clients (Mozilla 1.7.3, PopTray...).

I tried it on two different profiles: one is a Mozilla-imported one (with other
POP3 accounts on the same profile, and those work fine); the other is a newly
created profile with just this account that triggers the bug. With both
profiles, Thunderbird fails to download any email from that account.

I'll be attaching the POP3 debug log from Thunderbird ASAP.

Comment 1

[Ariel Dembling]

Attachment: Thunderbird's POP3 debug log of one failed POP3 session.

Here's the debug log created with level 4. All I did was open Thunderbird and
Get Mails.
As I said before, this bug must be triggered by some server response, since
other accounts work fine for me.

Comment 2

[Ariel Dembling]

Attachment: Packet log of traffic sniffed during a failed POP3 session (the same session as the POP3 debug log previously uploaded)

Here's the traffic log from the same POP3 session as the POP3 debug log.
For some reason, the client is sending always a duplicate packet.
Anyway, here's what's going on as far as I understand:
   a) Thunderbird first sends the AUTH command, but the server doesn't support
it and repliess -ERR
   b) Thunderbird then tries the CAPA command, and it gets some response
   c) For some reason, Thunderbird chooses the AUTH PLAIN authentication
method, and the server doesn't seem to like it and closes the connection.

Comment 3

[Ariel Dembling]

This might be related to bug #232125. Even if that's the case, and though that
one has been filed as a Enhancement Request, I think this is clearly a Critical
bug/problem/whatever since Thunderbird is rendered useless to the unlucky users
of wierd POP3 servers. In my particular case, it's the POP3 server of
Argentina's biggest cablemodem ISP (probably serving a five- to six-figure
number of users).

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

Christian, should we just go ahead and fix bug 232125, at least with a hidden
pref for now?

Comment 5

[Ariel Dembling]

Bug #213536 deals with the lack of UI response that affects this bug too.

Comment 6

[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
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[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.