295208 - Parse error and grouped by Date problem with bad Date: header entry

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 32216

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Hadmut Danisch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050513 Firefox/1.0.4 (Debian package 1.0.4-1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050513 Firefox/1.0.4 (Debian package 1.0.4-1)

Hi,

I sometimes receive some automatically generated mails from a database server. 
The author of the software didn't know about the RFC2822 date format and 
instead used the date format common for germany, e.g.

   Date: 20.05.2005 08:46:04

Most other people don't realize that because M$ Outlook simply 
takes the date of the first Received line if it can't parse the 
Date entry. 

However, things go wrong in Thunderbird:

- Thunderbird fails to sort mails properly. If the mail is from 
  yesterday, it detects it as 'yesterday' but moves the yesterday 
  folder to the bottom below 'old mail' in the mailbox window

   Sorting doesn't work properly.

- In the mail list it displays the date as 01.01.1970 01:00 
  so it can't be parsed. Since it already detected that the mail came 
  from yesterday, it means that there are different parsing routines.

- In the mail window the date is given as
  
  22.01.-32185 22:27

  Something goes really wrong here.

- Thunderbird sometimes goes crazy when dealing with such 
  mails. The mailbox window is not displayed competely anymore, 
  mails get not sorted properly, thunderbird behaves unnormal and 
  sometimes even the X11-Server crashes or gets blocked. 

  There seems to be a problem with a pointer or a buffer overrun.





Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Send yourself an email with the given Date header format, 
   use e.g. a yesterday's date
2. Turn your mailbox window into date-sorted Grouped by sort mode
3. Watch the mailbox and the messagew window

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

I can confirm this in part. The Date: isn't parsed correctly and shows up in the
thread pane as 12/31/1969 4pm (I'm -0800, I assume you must be ahead of GMT to
get the 1/1/1970 date). But my test message doesn't group with "yesterday's"
mail, it falls into "old" mail. Unlike your description, in the message pane or
the separate message window I see the date shown the same was as the thread pane.

So far no security sounding error. What sort of date led to the negative number
in the message pane? That one *does* worry me, as does your description of a
crash. But I haven't been able to reproduce either result.

Scott: how much of the date processing is farmed out to system routines to get
localized behavior?

Hadmut: depending on the answer to the previous question maybe some of the bug
is specific to Debian. What kernel or distro version are you using?

Comment 2

[Hadmut Danisch]

I just did the following test:

Telnet to localhost 25 and enter an e-mail with just 

DATA
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
Subject: test
Date: 24.05.2005 23:51:00

aabc
.


In the message list it appears with 01.01.1970 01:00

In the message window it has the 
date  
    01.10.-32179 07:04

Maybe the bug depends on the locale or time setting.

I've seen the problem with both computers in my office and at home. 
At home I have a self compiled 2.6.11 kernel. Debian is unstable 
bleeding edge. Thunderbird about shows  1.0.2 (20050331)

regards
Hadmut

Comment 3

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

I just got a little bit further. Maybe the problem is not a buffer overrun in 
the date parsing functions.

I noticed a similar problem when I deleted the oldest message while in 
"grouped by sort"/Time view. It seems as if the latest element of the list 
is not properly removed and if thunderbird tries to display a data structure 
that does not exist anymore, thus producing rubbish.

There could be some coincidence with the date parsing problem. I noticed that 
the malformed date is interpreted differently when displaying and sorting the 
messages. When the message gets the wrong date 1.1.1970 it is sorted to the 
very bottom of the list, but it looks as if other modules of thunderbird don't 
recognize the message as old. Maybe it happens that when removing messages with 
such a malformed date header (as I did), these messages (or their graphical 
gadgets) are removed from the tail of a linked list, while the tail is not 
closed properly. It looks as if Thunderbird still tries to display the 
last message that was just removed, but fails to find the data. 

Maybe it is a different problem and was just triggered by the date parsing 
problem.

regards
Hadmut
 

Comment 4

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

I meanwhile observed the same problem several times again: 

The problem occurs when in Grouped-by-date listing mode. 

It pretty much seems as if this mode had it's own date parsing 
routes which are the problem. E.g. when sorting or removing messages with an 
incorrect date header sometimes other messages get a "submessage entry"
(a + icon which indicates a subtree) which leads to nowhere, some messages
suddenly occur twice.

regards
Hadmut

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

See bug 32216 (and it's dependencies). Bug 166254 may be the fix.
(Obviously the group by is messed up since we don't have a reasonable date.)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 32216 ***

Comment 6

[benc]

I've been verifying the dupes for bug 32216, but I'm not going to verify this at this time, because of the mention of the problems deleting the mail, which might be bug 209501. The two might be related in this case.