315025 - Special characters in newgroup name causing problems with newsreader...

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Networking: NNTP, defect)

Description

[Ian]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915

A private nntp site uses "@vantage" as a newsgroup name which I think is in violation of standard naming for newgroups (I can't find the RFC that confirms this).  When I subscribe to this group, it succeeds in that it shows up in the list of groups, but I am unable to view/download any messages from the server.

Is there any workaround I can do to make this happen?  This also doesn't work with the latest version of thunderbird.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Subscribe to @vantage
2.click on the group to view messages
3.

Actual Results:  
Nothing shows up. No errors either.

Expected Results:  
Should show messages.

I've asked the administrator to rename the group, but he is unwilling.

Comment 1

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

MozillaAS v1.7.x is not supported anymore.

Can you reproduce with SeaMonkey v1.1.9 ?

Comment 2

[Glenn Knickerbocker]

We've run into this problem with a new private server in current versions of Thunderbird (I'm using 15.0.1).  It uses illegal characters in newsgroup names including !*,?[\] and  non-ASCII characters (in Unicode names).  Regardless of what groups are subscribed to, Thunderbird crashes when the subscribe dialog is closed when there's a large number of invalid group names.  Removing the invalid names from hostinfo.dat prevents the crash.

Comment 3

[Philip Chee]

When Thunderbird crashed did you allow the TB Crash reporter to send a crash report to the Mozilla servers?
Do you have one or more a crash reports?
Go Help > Troubleshooting Information
In the Application Basics section there is a link to about:crashes
Click on this link to open about:crashes.
Copy the most recent links (Right click copy link location) and paste the link in a comment here>

Comment 4

[Glenn Knickerbocker]

http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/bp-948175f2-6c99-4fe2-8465-b814d2121003
and a whole slew more in the preceding two hours from my tests trying to narrow this down to particular entries (I couldn't)

Comment 6

[Glenn Knickerbocker]

I've done some more experimenting with editing hostinfo.dat to narrow down what triggers the abend.  Most of the invalid names are in a single hierarchy that's only two levels deep, CommunitiesCategory.*, and that seems to be a factor.

* If I translate everything but "." to "x" in the invalid names, I don't get the abend.  This makes a lot of duplicates, so reduces the total number of unique group names.

* If I translate only the illegal characters to either "x" or ".", *and* I change the second character to ".", I don't get the abend.

* If I just translate the illegal characters, I still get the abend.
* If I just change the second character of invalid names to ".", I still get the abend.

So this seems to involve both the large number of invalid names and the large number of groups in a single branch of the hierarchy.  The numbers of groups in each branch after the change are:

32298 C.mmunitiescategory.*
39665 Communitiescategory.*

So the total before the change is >64K, and the total number of invalid names is just under 32K.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bp-18b4d344-affe-45b3-8d68-b46a12130118 is version 18, so we might assume this still happens on trunk. But if you want to test daily trunk build to see if it also has the problem, you can find it at https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ (use with caution)

other possible signatures...
 arena_dalloc | je_free | nsSubscribableServer::FreeSubtree(_subscribeTreeNode*)
je_free | nsSubscribableServer::FreeSubtree(_subscribeTreeNode*)
arena_run_tree_insert | arena_dalloc_small | arena_dalloc | je_free | nsSubscribableServer::FreeSubtree(_subscribeTreeNode*)
RtlEnterCriticalSection | arena_dalloc | je_free | nsSubscribableServer::FreeSubtree(_subscribeTreeNode*)

Comment 8

[Glenn Knickerbocker]

Still happens in v24.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(from whiteboard)
[infinite loop, nsSubscribableServer::FreeSubtree calling itself at mailnews/base/src/nsSubscribableServer.cpp:415]

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Glenn, it looks like you havfe seen this crash recently?
bp-4dddd279-8650-414c-848a-fb9202151111
0	xul.dll	nsSubscribableServer::FreeSubtree(_subscribeTreeNode*)	c:/builds/moz2_slave/tb-rel-c-esr38-w32_bld-0000000/build/mailnews/base/src/nsSubscribableServer.cpp:415
1	xul.dll	nsSubscribableServer::FreeSubtree(_subscribeTreeNode*)	c:/builds/moz2_slave/tb-rel-c-esr38-w32_bld-0000000/build/mailnews/base/src/nsSubscribableServer.cpp:415
2	xul.dll	nsSubscribableServer::FreeSubtree(_subscribeTreeNode*)	c:/builds/moz2_slave/tb-rel-c-esr38-w32_bld-0000000/build/mailnews/base/src/nsSubscribableServer.cpp:415

Comment 11

[Glenn Knickerbocker]

Yes, I still see this crash after every time I refresh the group list from this server, until I edit out the bad names again.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Tony, can you reproduce this?

Comment 13

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #12)
> Tony, can you reproduce this?

Don't know, my mail & newsgroup connections are too flaky for reliable tests.
Rainer, can you reproduce this?

Comment 14

[Rainer Bielefeld]

I will try to find STR, but it might take some days.

Comment 15

[Rainer Bielefeld]

I am not familar with all details of newsgroup reading, so here my results.

To have a common test bars I asked admins of news.aioe.org to create a local test group. This news server does not need authentication, you can use it without preparations. 
Please follow discussion with aioe admins on "aioe.helpdesk" under Subject "Temporary Newsgroup possible?"
I did following tests with 
 official  German SeaMonkey 2.46 FINAL  (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:49.0) 
 Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0 Build 20161213183751  (Default Classic Theme)  
 on German WIN7 64bit
 And
  TB Daily 54.0a1 (2017-02-04) (64-bit) on the same PC
a) We now have "local.@vantage" for our tests.
0. Launch
   official  German SeaMonkey 2.46 FINAL  (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:49.0) 
   Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0 Build 20161213183751  (Default Classic Theme)  
   on German WIN7 64bit
1. Launch Email Client → Subscribe "news.aioe.org" → 
   subscribe NG "aioe.helpdesk"
   » NG will appear in list
   » After [Download] you will see a list of postings
2. subscribe NG "local.@vantage"
   » NG will appear in list
3. [Download]
   » No postings downloaded                                                 :-(
   » Error Message similar to "NNTP ERROR occurred" appeared                :-(
   » After a short while newsserver becomes unusable                        :-(
     Mouse pointer always "busy" view, no more access for "news.aioe.org"
   » for news.mozilla.org all actions still work fine

I will do TB tests lateer (until now I only can say that I found "local.@vantage"

a) I also tried GrabIt, was able to subscribe braunschweig.allgemeines, but
   I did not find "local.@vantage"
d) URL for NG is <news://news.aioe.org:119/local.%40vantage>

Comment 16

[Rainer Bielefeld]

Attachment: Error Message (Screenshot)

e) 'Richtclick → Preferences' on newly subscribed "local.@vantage"
   causes error message from screenshot, additionally in Error Console
   an error message appears:
   Zeitstempel: 05.02.2017 13:15:45
   Fehler: NS_ERROR_FAILURE: Component returned failure code: 0x80004005
   (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIMsgFolder.updateFolder]
   Quelldatei: chrome://messenger/content/folderProps.js
   Zeile: 211

Comment 17

[Rainer Bielefeld]

f) After SeaMonkey 'Quit → Relaunch' "local.@vantage" will have vanished
   from list of subscribed NG for "news.aioe.org"

@Tony, @Wayne:
I hope this information and STR is sufficient to enable you for doing own debugging?

Comment 18

[Rainer Bielefeld]

g) "local.test" works fine with SM on "news.aioe.org"

Comment 19

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks! I hope other will take up the torch from here :)

Comment 20

[Rainer Bielefeld]

(In reply to Rainer Bielefeld from comment #17)
All the same with TB Daily 54.0a1 (2017-02-04) (64-bit)

Comment 21

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Closing because no crash reported since 12 weeks.

Comment 22

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

The crash signatures of the original report don't exist for version 68. But InvalidArrayIndex_CRASH | nsSubscribableServer::GetCellText does.

Can you still reproduce this crash, so we can update the crash signature?

Comment 23

[Rainer Bielefeld]

@Wayne Mery:
"local.@vantage" still causes all described problems with installation of unofficial (by wg9s) De SeaMonkey 2.53.2 (NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0 Build 20191230130008 {Milestone=60.3.2 | SourceStamp=f3720549528fd4e297a4b9f285acd2fe1d0a6938} (Default Classic Theme) on German WIN7 64bit:

• Mouse pointer always "busy"
• Update of NG on aioe.org does not work
• Error Message similar to "NNTP ERROR occurred" appeared after having subscribed NG
• No Contents in Mail Window for aioe.org
• NG will have dissappeared after relaunch of SeaMonkey (what helps to avoid further problems)

But no Crash ☺! So I think this one is no longer "critical"

I wonder whether such NG-name may exist. GROUP CREATION POLICIES (Last modified: 2013-06-03) is rather old, and I would prefer some RFC.

May be we should handle this one as Enhencement Request in future? SM / TB should undergo such a NG with invalid name without having problems with the other NG of that newsserver?

Comment 24

[Glenn Knickerbocker]

The server that we had this problem with no longer exists.

Comment 25

[Rainer Bielefeld]

Unfortunately I don't have time to do more research here.

Comment 26

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

Such newsgroup names are not valid as of RFC 5536 Section 3.1.4. See also bug 1788572.