714706 - SSL certificate validation warnings do not steal focus, causing seemingly unexplained failures

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Security, defect)

Description

[ben]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1
Build ID: 20111220165912

Steps to reproduce:

Attempted to send an email message using an outgoing SMTP server for which Thunderbird considers the SSL certificate CA unrecognized.


Actual results:

Sending the message failed with the following error:

"Sending of message failed.
The message could not be sent using SMTP server indietorrent.org for an unknown reason. Please verify that your SMTP server settings are correct and try again, or contact your network administrator."

The reason is known: Thunderbird did not trust the SMTP server's SSL certificate (the reason is irrelevant here), and spawned the "Add Security Exception" dialog, BUT (and here's the real problem), the "Send Message Error" dialog popped up almost immediately thereafter, obscuring the true cause of the problem: the required security exception.

Inexperienced users and users with multiple desktop displays can easily "lose" the "Add Security Exception" dialog and never realize why the failure to send occurred.


Expected results:

The "Add Security Exception" dialog should steal focus and refuse to relinquish it until the dialog has been dismissed.

Multiple such dialogs should be queued and the user forced to respond to each in turn.