823481 - Thunderbird gives misleading or meaningless error messages when disk full on the SMTP server (real server reply text isn't shown)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 576471

(MailNews Core :: Networking: SMTP, defect)

Description

[Alain Knaff]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20121129165506

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to send a mail via an SMTP server whose root partition happened to be full.


Actual results:

I got the following error message:
An error occurred sending mail: Unable to establish a secure link with SMTP server mail.lll.lu using STARTTLS since it doesn't advertise that feature. Switch off STARTTLS for that server or contact your service provider.


Expected results:

I should have gotten:
An error occurred sending mail: Server said "452 4.4.5 Insufficient disk space; try again later" when attempting to do STARTTLS

Comment 1

[Alain Knaff]

This is actually a recurring problem. There are many situation when Thunderbird has as at its disposal the exact reason of failure (152781, 536929, ...), but instead chooses to "paraphrase" the original message instead of telling the user the truth. Why is that? I hope, this isn't done on purpose.

Users who cannot deal with seeing error messages should use Outlook Express (and actually they do, indeed Windows has not yet a ballot for mail client...). Thunderbird and Firefox user should be told the truth, the entire truth, and nothing but the truth, not some watered down meaningless paraphrase. It is not user friendly when I need to do a telnet smtphost 25 to find out what really happened. In my case, the server plainly said what was going on, why can't Thunderbird relay this to me?

Comment 2

[:aceman]

For a POP3 error we show what the server returned. Maybe the same is missing for SMTP reply handling.