511203 - POP3 with Gmail fetches one or a few messages at a time while there's hundreds new

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Networking: POP, defect)

Description

[Behdad Esfahbod]

It started a few days ago with 3.0beta2 and persists with beta3.  When I turn my laptop on in the morning (coming back from hibernate in fact) and want to fetch mail, it used to work fine, but recently thunderbird fetches just a few (3, 4, ...) or more often, just one message.  I ctrl+t again, it connects again, fetches one more message.  I have to repeat this tens of times to get all my new messages.  POP3 with Gmail.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

I've seen that off and on for about as long as they've had POP access, particularly when my connection is bad, or when I have a lot to download, and always assumed it was them, not us.

A pop3 log (instructions in https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging) of two fetches should show whether they're lying to us about what they have, or we're being lazy about fetching.

Comment 3

[Behdad Esfahbod]

I've got the log.  Not very readable.  What should I look into it for?  I can attach, but have to clean up a bit as it includes my mail.

Comment 4

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I've got the log.  Not very readable.  What should I look into it for?  I can
> attach, but have to clean up a bit as it includes my mail.

Clean up and attach is fine. 
If you want to look into it you'll need a copy of the POP protocol RFC to understand what is going on.

Comment 5

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Attachment: pop3.log.gz

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

Thx for the log. Can you add some context to the log? What did you do as a user, and what happened with the downloading of messages? Do you have leave on server set, so that messages are left on the pop3 server? How many messages are on the server? When you edited out the recv lines, could you also have edited out the RETR commands we send to the server?

Comment 7

[Behdad Esfahbod]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Thx for the log. Can you add some context to the log? What did you do as a
> user, and what happened with the downloading of messages?

I woke up in the morning (expected to have 200 new mail), started tbird, ctrl+t, received one message, ctrl+t again, received another one, another ctrl+t, got two or three new ones this time.  Repeated this a few times, then closed tbird.

> Do you have leave on server set, so that messages are left on the pop3
> server?

Yes, leaving messages on server.

> How many messages are on the server?

Around 28 thousand.  I've had much much more than that before and it used to work just fine AFAIR.

>  When you edited out the recv lines, could you also have edited
> out the RETR commands we send to the server?

Don't think so.  I was very careful with that.

Comment 8

[David :Bienvenu]

So, as philor pointed out, the gmail POP3 server is basically only telling us about a single new message at a time (and 300 messages we knew about), and we retrieve that. The next time it tells about an other new message, etc. So somehow gmail has gotten itself in a bit of a confused state.

Comment 9

[Behdad Esfahbod]

That was also my first guess.

I have a theory now.  A few days ago I started connecting to the same POP3 account using my iPhone too.  Maybe that's what confusing it.

Feel free to close.  I'll try to contact Gmail devs.

Thanks all.

Comment 10

[David :Bienvenu]

No problem, good luck, if you find out anything interesting, please let us know if you get a chance...