480945 - Unix Mailspool never retrieves new mail by time delay or during startup

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Movemail, defect)

Description

[RichJ]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.19 (20081209)

'Check for new mail on startup' and 'check for new mail every 2 mins' are set.
I restarted it several times and waited upto 10 minutes for new mail. The only method to get new mail is by click the 'Get Mail' button.   I verified there was new mail in the mbox with mailx from cmd line, a new letter was sitting in the Inbox for 10 minutes, the poller does not see it.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set the account check mail on startup
2. Set the account to check mail every 2 or 5 minutes

Actual Results:  
On startup the message in the status display, "There are no new messages on server"

Expected Results:  
There should be new mail as one email was sitting in mbox for 10 minutes.



Also, after some testing I decided to change back the settings so the pop3 poller can retrieve the mail.  I disabled the poller in the Unix mailspool account.  This seems to have affected the pop3 poller as it stopped automatically retrieving mail.  I removed the mailspool account, the poller was still not working.  I then restarted TB and the poller began to operate as normal.  I tried reading the mailspool account, but I poller worked as normal for the pop3. So it might be an initial setting.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Ricj - can you reproduce ? and if you can can you attach pop" logs to this bug , this is documented at https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging ?

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

(A very old fixed issue was bug 201055).

Do try a build from 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-central/
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

I can confirm this on trunk in at least some circumstances (my test account currently only holds a movemail account and the requisite local folders). An error thrown from nsIPK11Token.checkPassword on line 576 of msgMail3PaneWindow.js seems to cause the login code to fail to be executed...

Comment 6

[Scott Nelson]

(In reply to comment #5)
> *** Bug 522530 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Thanks Joshua for the pointer (to here).

I can confirm that this bug still exists in TB 3.0b4 (built from source on linux and from the distributed linux binary).

Comment 7

[Scott Nelson]

This bug still exists in TB 3.0rc1

Comment 8

[Scott Nelson]

This bug still exists in TB 3.0rc2

Comment 9

[Scott Nelson]

Also note that TB 3.0 rc2 uses the 1.9.1 branch.

Comment 10

[Forrest Cahoon]

I can confirm this is still a bug in the Thunderbird 3.0 release binary (running on a SuSE 11 linux desktop).

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Not necessary to report the problem still exists, unless you know of a fix that was applied that is expected to resolve the issue.

Comment 13

[Markus W]

Possible workaround (works fine for me):

Found here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=476029

I will describe it again:

You have to add some values to your prefs.js.
Adding them with a text editor did not work for me, they are removed
at Thunderbird startup.

Add the values with Thunderbirds buildin-configuration-editor:

Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Config Editor

The following key should already be present, else - add it.
(Right click - Add - Boolean)

Change "server3" to fit your account.

user_pref("mail.server.server3.check_new_mail", true);

Add the following key, set to "false" first, it was removed
when I was trying to add as "true"...

user_pref("mail.server.server3.download_on_biff", false); 

Then restart Thunderbird, the key should still be present,
and set to "true.

user_pref("mail.server.server3.download_on_biff", true);

Restart Thunderbird again. New mails should be fetched on startup.

I additionally added 

user_pref("mail.server.server3.check_time", 2);

so I did not have to wait the standard interval of
10 minutes to see if it works. Don´t know if its necessary.

Hope this helps.

Comment 14

[Konstantin Svist]

Thanks a bunch, it works for me!

Comment 15

[Markus W]

I will try to fix this bug and submit a patch.

How can I assign the bug to myself?

Comment 16

[Markus W]

Attachment: Add "Automatically download new messages" to Unix Movemail accounts (equals "download_on_biff")

Due to the missing "Automatically download new messages" checkbox 
in ServerSettings - Unix Movemail accounts, new messages could not
be retrieved at Thunderbird startup or at specified time intervals.

The checkbox was set to "hidefor movemail" in the file "am-server.xul"
and was present in the section named <!-- POP3 -->

Now there is a new section named
<!-- Necessary for POP3 and Movemail (Bug 480945) -->
and the attribute hidefor movemail is removed.

The patch works fine. Mails are retrieved as expected.
The checkbox is visible and if checked,
the value "download_on_biff" "true" is added to the prefs.js.

Comment 17

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Comment on attachment 482086 [details] [diff] [review]
Add "Automatically download new messages" to Unix Movemail accounts (equals "download_on_biff")

This seems fine to me.  AFAIK The change is pretty limited and only adds an option to Movemail accounts which is already available for POP accounts.  So ui-r+ from me.

Comment 18

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Comment on attachment 482086 [details] [diff] [review]
Add "Automatically download new messages" to Unix Movemail accounts (equals "download_on_biff")

This seems fine, r=Standard8

Comment 19

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Checked in: http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/7ef9af322783

Thanks for the patch.

Comment 20

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/4.0b8pre SeaMonkey/2.1b2pre - Build ID: 20101026021317

Nowadays (and, of course, with the proper "Server settings" for my Movemail account) SeaMonkey downloads and empties /var/spool/mail/<username> without human intervention, and the "internal emails" appear in its mail folders. => VERIFIED.