307009 - With PGP 9 mail proxy TB reports SMTP send failure but message sent successfully

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Jim Garrison]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

About 10-20% of the time, when sending an email, TB will claim
that the message was not sent due to a problem with the SMTP
server.  However, the message IS sent successfully.  I have captured
an SMTP session trace with Ethereal for an instance where this 
happened (attached).  I can see nothing unusual in the trace.
If I dismiss the dialog and resend the message it is sent again
and TB claims the resend failed with about the same frequency.
It has taken as many as four attempts to get TB to say the message
was sent.  Recipients receive as many copies as there were attempts.

I am attaching:

1) A sceen capture of the error dialog
2) An ethereal capture file of a successful transmission
3) An ethereal capture file of a failed transmission of the same message


Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Jim Garrison]

Attachment: Screen capture of the error dialog

Comment 2

[Jim Garrison]

Attachment: Ethereal (libpcap) trace of successful SMTP session

Both this and failure.cap are captures of attempts to send
exactly the same plain text message to the same set of recipients.  
success.cap represents an instance when the send was reported to succeed 
by TB.

Comment 3

[Jim Garrison]

Attachment: Ethereal (libpcap) trace of "failed" SMTP session

Both this and success.cap are captures of attempts to send
exactly the same plain text message to the same set of recipients.  
failure.cap represents an instance when the send was reported to 
have failed by TB.  In actuality, the message WAS sent.

Comment 4

[Jim Garrison]

Forgot to include version info:
Thunderbird version 1.0.6 (20050716)

Comment 5

[Jim Garrison]

Attachment: Another SMTP session capture - see comment

This file captures an attempt to send a single short test message to myself.  
It took four tries to send it, the first three resulting in the error dialog.  

I can't see anything different in the trace between the first three 
'unsuccessful' tries and final 'successful' one.

Comment 6

[Jim Garrison]

I'm changing this to 'major' severity because I'm seeing it much
more frequently, and even though I'm pretty sure the message was
sent, if I just cancel out of the send attempt after the first 
supposedly failed try then the message is not saved in the SENT
folder, which is a real pain.

Comment 7

[Jim Garrison]

This seems to be related to PGP 9.  

In the latest bloatware incarnation, PGP implements automatic email 
encryption by proxying the SMTP and POP connections.  I had the proxy
function turned on but no accounts defined, which SHOULD have meant that
it wasn't attempting to proxy anything.  However, after totally disabling
the proxy function I've stopped seeing send errors.

<vent>
PGP 9 is the worst "upgrade" of any software package I've ever seen.
I'm going back to PGP 8 on all systems I use.  In addition, they have
a truly fascist approach to support.  If you don't pay for support
there doesn't seem to be any way to submit bug reports after your
free 30-day install support window.
</vent>

It's curious that I installed and configured PGP 9 a couple of months
ago, but the errors didn't start happening until a week ago, and the
frequency was increasing over time.

I'm changing the severity to MINOR, but will leave this open in case
I still see occasional errors with PGP.  If I don't see any errors 
by the weekend I'll close this bug INVALID.

Comment 8

[Jim Garrison]

The problem is definitely PGP9, so I'm changing the title to reflect this.
Since this is not really Mozilla's problem, what close status should I use?
The incompatibility should be captured in the database for other people
who run into the same problem.

Comment 9

[Jim Garrison]

I gave up on the commercial PGP product shortly after I filed this bug.
I now use GnuPG/Enigmail, and that works for me.  Since nobody else has 
commented on this 33 months, I suggest this bug be resolved WONTFIX.

Comment 10

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Based on comment #8 I close this bug as Invalid, because not is related to TB.
Thanks for depth analysis Jim (and feel free to change status if you don't agree).