305139 - mail accounts go to "Delivering Mail" an never connect to MTA.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Greg Guldenschuh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

Have several mail accounts, some set as POP3 and some IMAP in Thunderbird.  On
some occasions, when trying to send messages to ANY account in TB, the sending
dialog window pops up with the message "Delivering mail" and all of TB stops
waiting on this process.  See additional information ofr more.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.attempt to connect to a server where the MTA is not running for a few accounts
in TB, but not all the accounts.
2.wait some unspecified period of time.
3.

Actual Results:  
described in details

Expected Results:  
connected to MTA and delivered mail

I think I have found a relationship here.  After a few of these episodes, I have
noticed that the MTA on my mail server is not running.  I believe that the hangs
have something to do with either the amount of time since the lase connection or
the number of times TB has tried to connect to the server with no MTA running. 
In either case this "Delivering Mail" message pops up in the send mail dialog
window and the application hangs.  We simply cannot connect to ANY MTA once this
happens.  My fix has been to insure the MTA is running on the server before
connecting.  I have marked this as critical because of TB hanging, but going to
task manager and killing the TB process then restarting it resets everything
back to normal.  Not the most elegant workaround, but it does seem to get the
job done.  In my case, I now insure the MTA is running on this internal server.

Comment 1

[Mike Riley]

This bug is still alive and driving us crazy in TBird 1.5. I cannot understand why further action hasn't been taken, and why it is not confirmed. It is so easy to reproduce.

I have six Inboxes for POP mail, each set to poll for new mail every 1 minute. Therefore, in about 8 minutes, I reach what seems to be an internal polling limit of about 50... and then TBird grinds to a halt.

Comment 2

[Greg Guldenschuh]

Mike,
  Have you checked to see if all your mail accounts are actually connecting?  In the followup i posted, I had a MTA problem on one server and this "hang" is the result.  Now, I never found anywhere in TBird a setting to show me if there was a problem connecting to an account.  That might be a good addition going forward so TBird alerts me there is a problem somewhere before it hangs.

   Mike, I also spend almost all day in front of my system, but I have found that a 5 minute check of my accounts is more than suitable.  Maybe you should reexamine your polling settings to see if a less frequent polling would make sense.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Greg, Mike do you still see this problem when using latest version 2?

Comment 4

[Greg Guldenschuh]

Wayne,
  Haven't had the mail server down for any length of time since then.  So far, I have not experienced a repeat of the issue.  I only check mail on an every 10 minute basis in the account setup.  On occasion, when I am waiting on something, I manually go much faster, but there I know the MTA is actually up and running.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

are you saying the problem is gone for you?

Comment 6

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESO INCO per last comment and lack of response.