548721 - HTML email display, Sending Message, Save to Draft don't complete after running a while

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Bruce]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100111 Thunderbird/3.0.1

First of all, I upgraded from 2.X to 3.0.1 a week ago, and I notice these problems which I did not have with 2.X. I presume they are related in some way, but am not sure, so I put them all together here for now. Second, I have had to turn off the CONDSTORE feature as reported in another bug (wrongly marking emails unread), so perhaps this is related also.

I have many accounts (about 15), mostly IMAP (and a POP3), with zillions of messages and subfolders under most accounts, along with loads of message filters to move messages to the various subfolders, including across different accounts. Most IMAP accounts are on my server on the local LAN, but some are not. I also deal with dozens of new emails per day. Perhaps this is related to the size of the email boxes as well.

I run Thunderbird initially, and everything works normally. However, after some period of time, usually tens of minutes, the following problems occur:

A. When reading HTML emails, TB 3.0.1 says "Loading message" and never displays the graphics. Text is displayed normally. (Yes, I have tried all the "Doesn't display HTML email things.) TB will sit there forever with the "loading message" status report on the read email message tab.

B. When sending email, TB says it is connecting to the server, and again sits there forever without ever sending anything, nor complaining about any errors. There is no timeout message. I check my own server email log (/var/log/maillog on Fedora 12 Linux using Dovecot 1.2.10), and it doesn't even show that any email login is taking place.

C. TB also then fails to even be able to save a new message composition in the Drafts folder of the account, although this feature seems to be the last to break. Trying to save a draft just says that the copy to the folder failed, asking for a retry.

D. When this set of problems starts, there is no way to fix it without restarting TB. And many times I must kill the TB process to get it to exit, as if TB is hanging on something before exiting - probably the "send email before exiting" now that I think about it here as I type this.

All these problems have the characteristics of a memory leak or internal timeout problem since they only happen after some usage of Thunderbird. After I get the TB process ended (exit or killing it) and restart TB, everything works again for a while (e.g. the tens of minutes).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run Thunderbird and leave it running for a while - tens of minutes and longer
2. Read HTML emails and send HTML emails
3. Then after a while, Thunderbird no longer operates properly as described in the details above.
4. Sometimes I must kill the process with Task Manager to "reset" Thunderbird - it does not exit within tens of seconds after clicking the close box.
Actual Results:  
As I describe in the problem area.

Expected Results:  
Displaying HTML email immediately, sending the message should work within a reasonable number of seconds, and saving to a Draft folder should work similarly.

I did look through the bug list, and some bugs seem similar, like HTML email display taking a minute, but nothing close enough was found, so I submitted this.

I am also running TB as an x86 (win32) program in this Vista x64.

Lastly, I usually leave TB on all the time so that it picks up all new messages on a regular basis.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

this sounds vaguely like an item posted in getsatisfaction or one of the newsgroups - were you in one of those areas?

let's call this major.

do one or more of http://bit.ly/bV2UjI match up, either to the type of message, or the end result?

Comment 2

[Bruce]

No, that wasn't me in those areas. The closest problems would be:

Bug 536873 -  TB3.0 slow, takes a long time to load HTML messages with View Message Body as Original HTML, sits at "Loading Message ..." or presents blank screen  

Bug 545126 -  HTML Mail View very slow (45 sec - 1min)

In my case, the pictures in the HTML email never load. "Never" is defined as probably an hour, after which I canceled the operation.

Note: Saving the message as an HTML file displays everything perfectly when using Firefox to view it.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Bruce, do you still see this problem when running version 5 or newer?

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to previous question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.