579168 - Activity Manager error message issued by IMAP code fails to identify message, or even mailbox, if error is for special IMAP command(eg. STATUS) which is issued without folder selection as RFC requests

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, enhancement)

Description

[Chris Pepper]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Thunderbird/3.1

I keep getting this error, always in pairs:

"The current command did not succeed. The mail server for account reppep responded: System I/O error."

Good to identify the account, but I also need the mailbox and whatever message identifying information Thunderbird can provide, so I can figure out what's wrong and fix it. This account has hundreds of mailboxes and hundreds of thousands of messages.

Telling me there's a problem without any identifying information is not helpful.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Observe "The current command did not succeed. The mail server for account reppep responded: System I/O error.", popped up by Thunderbird periodically.
2. Look for folder/message identifying information.
3. Curse.
Actual Results:  
No information beyond the account is provided.

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should provide as much identifying information as possible, including mailbox and ideally message ID or other identifier -- at least whatever it used via IMAP to request the message that returned an error instead.

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Are you requesting improvement of error message only?
No need of next?
(a) To know what is cause of error message of "System I/O error" from server
(b) To know for which folder, for what operation, the message is returned.
(c) To know why periodical popup started from Tb 3.1.
    To know how to stop the annoying repeated popups.

Phenomenon itself is probably same as bug 574521 and bug 574864(Please read thru these two bug). Reason of error message from server may be same as one of bug 574521, bug 574864, bug 547783.

Get IMAP log, and check IMAP level flow. You can know mail folder and IMAP command for on which error occurs.
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging
> MS Win example : SET NSPR_LOG_MODULES=timestamp,imap:5
If you need log analysis by developers, attach log file to this bug, after replacing sensitive data such as mail address, mail body text, sensitive folder name etc., please.

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Error message itself is issued by IMAP code instead of Activity Manager. Adding IMAP in bug summary to avoid misleading.

Comment 3

[Chris Pepper]

WADA,

a) Yes, I'd love if Thunderbird could diagnose the error, but thought "System I/O error" was just a string which TB passes along from Cyrus IMAP and cannot interpret.
b) Yes, I asked for the trigger in the bug report -- TB should at least know which folder it requested when triggering the error.
c) No, the popups aren't that annoying yet, and I can tell Growl to ignore TB if I want.

Once I know what folder is causing errors, I will try to find the cause myself. If that's unsuccessful I might ask for further help here.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

If the command is on a folder, we do actually include the folder name in the error. The fact that there's no folder name means that it wasn't on a particular folder. And no folder means no message, etc.

Looking at the code, the one exception is the STATUS command, which operates on a folder, but doesn't require the IMAP selected state. I'll tweak the code to include the status command in the type of commands that include the folder in the error.

It would also be really nice if we put the whole command that failed in the activity manager.

In 3.1.1, out yesterday, we won't show an alert for these errors.

Comment 5

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #4)
> If the command is on a folder, we do actually include the folder name in the error.
> The fact that there's no folder name means that it wasn't on a particular folder. And no folder means no message, etc.

David, really?
In bug 574521 case, which is for STAT command case with no specific seletced folder(it's required fo STAT command), we could know folder name because Gmail IMAP put folder name in error message text. In bug 574521 case, which is also STAT command case with no specific seletced folder, we couldn't know folder name, because IMAP server didn't put folder name in error message text. 
David, what do you men by "command is on a folder"? Commands issued after SELECT is issued for an IMAP folder at a chached connection? If so, it's not applicable to STAT command case.

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

WADA, we should know which folder we're STATing because we have the url we're running, which knows the folder, because it needs to pass it to the STATUS command.

"command is on a folder" means that the connection must be in the selected state on that folder before running, per the IMAP RFC. Yes, it's not applicable to the STAT command, which is why the code doesn't currently give you the folder name in the server alert message. I'm saying it should do so for the STAT command as well.

Even if gmail puts the folder name in the error message, other servers do not, and it's better for the folder name to appear twice than not at all.

Comment 7

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #3)
> c) No, the popups aren't that annoying yet, and I can tell Growl to ignore TB if I want.

No periodical slide-in alert(pop up)? Or you already worked around it?

> Once I know what folder is causing errors, I will try to find the cause myself.
> If that's unsuccessful I might ask for further help here.

If not periodical pop up/alert, it means that problem is not caused by STAT for periodical new mail check. Chris Pepper(bug opener), when(by what your operation) did your problem occur?

Comment 8

[Chris Pepper]

I was getting Growl notifications (always 2) periodically. They dismissed themselves, and weren't so frequent I found them awful. I haven't seen them under 3.1.1, but have mostly been using TB2 on another Mac since I upgraded.

Comment 9

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Changing to Enhancement, because request of error message improvement.

Comment 10

[Chris Pepper]

It's a bug that Thunderbird provides useless error messages. I have 5.6gb of mail on the IMAP server, so telling me there's a problem or two, without any identifying information, is a bug.

Comment 11

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: proposed fix