479712 - Moving emails to "undisclosed recipients" causes hang with "The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: Message contains invalid header."

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Michael]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19

I was trying to move messages from one email account to another.  The operation would fail with the error message "The current command did not succeed.  The mail server responded: Message contains invalid header." The problem appears to occur when I try to move a spam message that has "undisclosed recipients" in the 'To:' field.  Then Mozilla stops responding to commands in the mail window until it is shut down and restarted.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. get spam message with "undisclosed recipients" in the 'To:' field
2. attempt to move the spam message to another account
3. there is no step 3.
Actual Results:  
as described above

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird becomes unstable and has to be restarted to continue.

Either 1. work or 2. fail gracefully.

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Move from IMAP folder to IMAP folder? Or local mail folder to IMAP folder?
What is written in the To: header?

Get IMAP log and check flow first.
> Getting log : http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_logging_for_mail/news
> IMAP command/response : http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3501.html

> Expected Results:  
> Thunderbird becomes unstable and has to be restarted to continue.

"Actual Result:" isn't it? Do you want unstable Tb? :-)
What phenomenon/symptom do you mean by "unstable"?.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Michael, can you reproduce using beta 2 and get crash reporter id?

backup your profile first, then use
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Breakpad#Location_of_crash_reports

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

I suspect the first server was generating an invalid To: address field to get the "unspecified recipients" string, and the second server complained about the invalid rfc822 message header.

Comment 4

[Michael A. Pasek]

I'd agree with David (comment #3).  A 'To:' field containing ONLY "Undisclosed Recipients:;" (or a variation thereof) is a violation of RFC2821 when sent to an SMTP server that is acting as a "gateway" (i.e., is not the server where the final recipient's mailbox resides):

3.8.4 Other Header Fields in Gatewaying

   The gateway MUST ensure that all header fields of a message that it
   forwards into the Internet mail environment meet the requirements for
   Internet mail.  In particular, all addresses in "From:", "To:",
   "Cc:", etc., fields MUST be transformed (if necessary) to satisfy RFC
   822 syntax, MUST reference only fully-qualified domain names, and
   MUST be effective and useful for sending replies.  The translation

Since the gateway would have no possible way of transforming "Undisclosed Recipients:;" to satisfy the "MUST reference only fully-qualified domain names" requirement, it (correctly) rejected the message.

The correct action of the sending agent would have been to NOT include a "To:" header; from RFC2822:

Field           Min number      Max number      Notes
[...]
to              0               1

In closing, though, if TB _did_ hang because the server rejected a message, that's a bug.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

can do much more without reporter response, unless I am mistaken.