536957 - Show Server Timeouts, should show more helpful Error Messages

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Networking: SMTP, defect)

Description

[Flex]

User-Agent:       Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Thunderbird/3.0

Instead of showing some helpful error messages, Thunderbird often just tries to send/receive mails and then will show "Server Timeout" while other mail clients are able to display appropriate error messages just after a second.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Try to access GMX or Yahoo mailbox with the wrong Authentication/SSL-Settings, or try posting to news.gmane.org, or play around with invalid settings
2. Try the same with some other Mail Client or Newsreader (e.g. Becky/Opera)
Actual Results:  
TB often just displays "Server Timeout" after half a minute.

Expected Results:  
For example Becky in this case is able to display an appropriate error message just after a second.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Can you reproduce and give us a smtp log as described at https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging#Main_Logging_options_within_MailNews ?

Comment 2

[Flex]

I will try to make this within the next days but it really is not difficult to reproduce this. Just make some wrong settings (especially with SSL or Authentication) and you will notice that TB in most of the cases doesn't give you an useful error message.

Comment 3

[Flex]

For example:
Just change your username to a wrong username and TB will try for halb a minute and then say "Login failed [Retry] [Enter New Password] [Cancel]"

But it seems that especially the error messages on wrong SSL/Secure settings have to be improved in version 3.x.

Comment 4

[Flex]

Another Problem still existing in Version 3.1.7:

Thunderbird says "message could not be sent". But the message was sent! That way some people press send again and send the mail twice.

Error messages are still not very helpful in Thunderbird. :(

Comment 5

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Removing myslef on all the bugs I'm cced on. Please NI me if you need something on MailNews Core bugs from me.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Flex from comment #4)
> Another Problem still existing in Version 3.1.7:
> 
> Thunderbird says "message could not be sent". But the message was sent! That
> way some people press send again and send the mail twice.

is this one bug 202426?


in query http://mzl.la/1UblKDt I didn't find clear duplicate for the rest of this

Comment 7

[Flex]

Error messsages still are not really useful.

I just got:
"Server XXX lost connection. Server might be down, or network problems exist."

The real reason another Mail (The Bat) showed, was:
"IMAP  - Maximum number of connections from user+IP exceeded (mail_max_userip_connections=10)"

I really can't understand why after all these years you'll still need another mail client to figure out the real reason of connection problems.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Version 91 has all new smtp backend code. If you can still reproduce this issue, please file a new bug report https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MailNews%20Core&component=Networking%3A%20SMTP