342268 - Posting a message with an empty body through NNTP => not correctly handled

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Pascal Sartoretti]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.5.0.4 (20060516), as well as Mozilla Suite 1.7.13

Thunderbird (and Mozilla as well) allows to post a message to a newsgroup even if the message has an empty body. This gives an error back from the NNTP server; depending on the server (e.g. Microsoft Exchange), the error message may be cryptic.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a message with an empty body
2. Post it to a newsgroup


Actual Results:  
Error message from the NNTP server. The message contents depends from the server, and may be cryptic.

Expected Results:  
Three possible solutions:

1- Produce a warning before sending. The user should then not be surprised to see an error from the NNTP server.

2- Refuse to send.

3- Generate a dummy empty body and send the message.

It is not clear to me if the various RFCs around NNTP allow or not to have an empty body. But all servers I have tested refuse it.

Comment 1

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

bug 3746 comment 32 claims that this is already fixed, and on Trunk, I can confirm that Thunderbird does not send a message if it is empty, but it doesn't warn when doing so apparently...

Comment 2

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

nope, it went through...

Comment 3

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

I'm not sure that an empty body actually violates any RFC or standard, but even if it does, I think the way it's handled now is quite sufficient.