Closed Bug 542642 Opened 14 years ago Closed 14 years ago

Gmail occasionally does not send e-mails after upgrading to FF 3.6

Categories

(Core :: General, defect)

Product:
Core
Component:
General
Version:
1.9.2 Branch
Platform:
x86
Windows XP
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED
Tracking Flags:
Tracking Status
blocking1.9.2 --- .2+
status1.9.2 --- .2-fixed
blocking1.9.1 --- -
status1.9.1 --- unaffected

People

(Reporter: justin.lebar+bug, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Keywords: regression, Whiteboard: [evang-wanted-3.6][fixed by 547239]) 

Filing on behalf of Caroline (cc'ed).

Upgraded to FF 3.6 on 1/21.  Starting on 1/22, she discovered that some of her e-mails weren't being delivered.  When an e-mail wasn't delivered, an e-mail addressed to her would appear in her sent mail folder.  The subject and bodies of these e-mails were empty.

I had her disable all of her extensions except Adblock Plus, and she had the same problem with two e-mails today.  I'm having her run in safe mode to see if the problem still occurs.

It's entirely possible that this is a Gmail bug, but the fact that this started happening the day after she upgraded FF makes me suspicious.  Perhaps some of our XHR changes are breaking things very occasionally?

We've also posted on the Gmail help forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?fid=76845f5a4a0f527d00047df5037410e4&hl=en
The affected system is a Windows XP laptop.  She's accessing Gmail over SSL, so I doubt virus scanners are playing with the traffic.
And it happened again yesterday, this time while she was running in safe mode.
This sounds like a very difficult bug to debug.
Is there any reliable way to reproduce the problem.

Has Caroline tried with a new profile?
(In reply to comment #3)
> This sounds like a very difficult bug to debug.
Seriously.  My main hope in putting this bug out here is that someone else will find it and confirm that they're having the same problem.

We'll try a new profile.
Btw, have you asked #qa if they have heard of this kind of problem?
(In reply to comment #5)
> Btw, have you asked #qa if they have heard of this kind of problem?

I asked a few times today, but nobody seemed to be familiar with the issue.
Okay, we have some action on this one!

Apparently this is happening to others ([1] and a number of other gmail support threads listed in that thread).

It's been suggested that the problem occurs only when one's running Addblock Plus and FF 3.6, or that the problem only happens when clicking on the bottom "send" button as opposed to the top one.  I don't think any add-on is the problem, since Caroline ran in safe-mode for a while and eventually reproduced the problem.  And anyway, ABP ignores by default pages accessed over https.

Caroline, can you switch back to FF, disable ABP, and confirm that the problem still happens?

[1]: http://www.google.de/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=51cd56db6f35395b&hl=en&fid=51cd56db6f35395b00047f57f06638d0
Ugh, this is going to be very hard to fix without reliable steps to reproduce :(

Really seems like something we need to get the gmail team involved in.

Chris: Do we have any good contacts there?
Some, yeah, will need to check my whiteboard when I get to the office.
I can confirm that this exact error has occurred in our gmail account, running FF 3.6.  First noticed on 1/24 and has occurred 6 times since then, including last evening.  Many  other emails have been sent without the error occurring.

We do not run ABP, we are using a laptop running vista
While running Firefox 3.6 with ABP disabled, I have been able to reproduce the problem today after sending 9 e-mails.  (For comparison, I ran Chrome for over a week, sending over 45 e-mails, without any errors.)

I noticed a couple things about the problem e-mail.  First, the e-mail was a reply message, so I clicked "Send and Archive" (the G-mail labs feature).  After clicking on this, G-mail returned me to my inbox as usual, BUT the original message was not archived. It was still in my inbox.  Second, at the top of the inbox was the message, "Your message has been sent.  View message View message" (the link to view my sent message appeared twice).  When I clicked on one of these links, it showed me the blank e-mail in my sent mail.

I don't know if this Send & Archive bug is related or not - I've never seen it show up with two links to "View message" before, or fail to archive the message.  Regardless, I ran G-mail with the labs features turned off for several days and still had the problem, so I'm pretty sure that it's not just a Send & Archive labs bug that's causing the blank e-mails.

I'll create a new Firefox profile today and keep running Firefox without ABP to see if I still have the problem.
To bug opener and all problem repoters:

Can you get HTTP log?
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/http-debugging.html
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/reference/html/prlog.html#25328
> SET NSPR_LOG_MODULES=timestamp,nsHttp:5,nsHostResolver:5
If and ONLY IF Fx's fault is seen in log, attach log file(never paste), please.
Caroline, what did you discover?
Christopher: What are you referring to?

After one day of running a clean profile I have not had any G-mail problems yet, but based on my track record with this bug, it could take several days before it happens again.  I'll post if/when it does.
Whiteboard: [evang-wanted-3.6]
Adding Michael Davidson to this.  Michael, do you have people on your end that might make tracking this a little easier?  Sounds like people sending mails without bodies with 3.6.  We need some help investigating / tracking.
I will forward to the Gmail QA team to see if they can repro.
Caroline, have you seen this recently? Can you check your sent mail for 2/10 at 5:32 Eastern time?

(I'm a Gmail engineer looking at exceptions on your server.)

If you do repro again, please update this bug with

- username
- time the email was sent

Thanks,
Michael
Michael: I did send a message at 5:32PM ET on 2/10 but this was a normal message, no errors.
Update:  I've been running G-mail in Firefox with a new Firefox profile for 2 weeks now without reproducing the bug.  As per a suggestion from Justin, I'm going to switch back to using G-mail with my old profile to see if the bug is still happening.  I'll try to capture it happening with Firebug.
Update:  Yesterday (3/2/10) at 4:15PM ET I reproduced the bug while running G-mail in my old profile (username: caroline.schermer).  This was just one day after switching back, and I think the 5th e-mail.

Unfortunately there was a problem with Firebug and I couldn't get the log file, but that should be resolved now, so the next time I should have a log of the event.

Also of note, is that again the bug happened in tandem with a "Send & Archive" issue, which is that after I clicked "Send and Archive" the e-mail didn't go through and the original message was not archived but remained in my Inbox.
Question.  What are your proxy preferences set to?  Could you be seeing effectively bug 547239 (or one of the bugs it blocks)?  The symptom is that if you actually use a PAC file or end up doing proxy autodetect and the timing works out just wrong then form POSTs can lose their data...

Note that I just pushed a fix for that bug to the 1.9.2 branch, and the fix has been on m-c since last Friday, so it would be interesting to see whether any of the builds with that fix (using the 1.9.2 branch nightly from tomorrow should be pretty safe, I think) show the problem.
Caroline's proxy settings were to auto detect, so bug 547239 could indeed be the problem.

She's gone on a trip for a week, but I'll post to the gmail newsgroup and suggest that people change their proxy settings (if that doesn't mess up their connection) or upgrade to the 1.9.2 nightly and see if that fixes the problem.
Upgrading is better if it will get auto-updated to 1.9.2.2 final.... will it?
Sure it will--and then the next day it will upgrade right past it. Of course it will never be branded "Firefox" though, it'll stay "Namoroka" the whole time.

Are you confident enough that bug 547239 is the fix to call this one "fixed", or is that just a theory?
blocking1.9.2: --- → ?
status1.9.1: --- → unaffected
status1.9.2: --- → wanted
Depends on: 547239
Keywords: regression
If the proxy setting fixes this bug, then I'm confident that bug 547239 fixed it.
blocking1.9.1: --- → -
blocking1.9.2: ? → .2+
Whiteboard: [evang-wanted-3.6] → [evang-wanted-3.6][fixed by 547239]
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Justin, is the problem fixed for Caroline or were she able to see the problem again? Could you run a test with the old proxy settings and the Firefox 3.6.2 release candidate? That would be very helpful!

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.6.2-candidates/build3/
Caroline was out for all of last week, so she's only been browsing with the updated proxy settings for a few days.  She hasn't observed the problem since changing the setting.

I see only one person on the Google help forum [1] affirmatively indicate that they've observed the problem after setting |no proxy|.  A lot of people are claiming that the problem went away after they changed the setting.  It's hard to say for sure what that means, but I think it's likely that changing the proxy setting fixed the problem.

I'll switch Caroline to the RC and post back here if we have any issues.

[1] http://www.google.de/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=51cd56db6f35395b&hl=en
Thanks Justin!
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