823898 - Thunderbird 17 freezes when reading certain large text emails

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[joel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20121129151842

Steps to reproduce:

I have certain large text-based emails (automatic error reports) which are consistently freezing up Thunderbird (100% CPU usage, does not recover) every time I try to view them.


Actual results:

Complete freeze (100% CPU)


Expected results:

Ability to view the email

Comment 1

[joel]

Attachment: Cleaned version of my email ([Removed] in place of sensitive information)

I would guess this particular email crashes Thunderbird because of the large base64-encoded images it contains...

Comment 2

[martin.gruner]

Attachment: freezing_markup_sample.eml

I can confirm this problem. In my case Thunderbird freezes and consumes 100% CPU for a few minutes until it actually displays the email (freezing_markup_sample.eml). This email has 2.5 MB. It is an autogenerated diff that is plaintext, but contains HTML tags from the diff. My guess would be that some filters (sanity checks?) in Thunderbird choke on the big amount of tags in the mail, even though it is a plaintext email. Maybe the processing would not be neccessary in this case? If it is, it would be better to show a waiting icon and perform the processing in the background, not blocking the application for a while.
Thanks a lot for considering!

Comment 3

[martin.gruner]

This could be considered a security issue as it causes a DOS.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

takes forever

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Lee, can you test this with a current version or beta?

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thomas, can your reproduce with the attached testcase?

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Walt, can you reproduce?

Comment 8

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Attachment: image.png

I get this using the email from comment 2 and the second task bar item, but no window.
Clicked "Force Quit" and my Fedora build of Thunderbird 78.7.0 closed.

Comment 9

[Thomas Raddatz]

Attachment: thomas-email-loaded-image.png

The email has been loaded after ~8 minutes on a PC, Win10, i7-4790T, 16 GB RAM.