857392 - Yahoo POP message RETR error: inactivity timeout Thunderbird 17.0.4

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Bev E]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
Build ID: 20130116073211

Steps to reproduce:

TB pulling mail from Yahoo, POP server. Login is successful, but get timeout during message retrieval.  Have a large inbox on Yahoo but have been successfully pulling messages down to TB for years until one day (3/27/2013 ~6:47am EDT) TB started to hang and then get timeout.

Have cleared (filed in a folder) messages on the server that arrived near the time when this started to happen; have cleared spam folder.

In TB, have disabled all filtering.  Have moved all old messages out of TB inbox.

Uninstalled Norton Security Suite, 20.2.0.19 (a feature-limited version supplied by Comcast).  Problem persisted.  Installed AVG Free AntiVirus, problem persists.

Cleaned registry, temp files, cache.  Windows updates are all applied.

Captured a debug log file, attached.

TB 17.0.4
Win 7 Pro, SP1, on Pentium Dual Core 


Actual results:

One day... it just started happening... can't download mail via POP from Yahoo servers to TB.

Login occurs successfully.  Status shows checking inbox... watching Windows Task Manager I see TB climbs to 50% cpu and stays there (I have Pentium Dual-Core CPU)... a half minute or so passes and then I get the error message: "The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server plus.pop.mail.yahoo.com responded: inactivity timeout."  When it fails, the status line at the bottom of the TB window indicates it was trying to bring down message 1 of over 60000, so the Yahoo counter has gotten reset.  I have about 300 new messages, since the last time I pulled down messages (3/27/2013).

I've tried switching to pop.mail.yahoo.com and get same result.  I've tried backing up to earlier versions of TB (15.0.1, 13.0.1) and problem persists.  I'm back on 17.0.4 now.

This morning, after having deleted about 6 weeks worth of my oldest messages on the Yahoo server, I tried again, and this time when I restarted TB it started pulling down messages.  The status line showed it was downloading message 1 of 69082 and it stayed on that message counter.  However, I could see the inbox counter rising; after about 600 messages came down, I closed TB.  I waited a bit and started TB up again.  And it failed the same way as above, with a timeout.    Haven't been able to get it to successfully pull down any more messages.  When it fails, the status line indicates its trying to pull down 500 or so fewer messages than it did when I had the one successful connection this morning, so the Yahoo counter is staying true.


Expected results:

Normal connection and incremental download of Yahoo messages on the server should have happened.

Comment 1

[Bev E]

Doc too large to upload; see:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B49hcAKAtRQjUm5GclJfalFlbGM/edit?usp=sharing

Comment 2

[Bev E]

Revised attachment to redact account info.

New one here: 
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B49hcAKAtRQjeGxDVnlRQThjX3M/edit?usp=sharing

Comment 3

[Bev E]

Have changed my server settings to leave messages on server for 90 days.  Deleted a chunk of my oldest messages to get past the last TB download and started TB.  Have been downloading messages successfully.  Have stopped and restarted TB and resumed download.  Here's my theory of the above problem...

Because the counter on the Yahoo side of the connection got lost, Yahoo started retrieving all the messages on the server, beginning with the oldest, back in 2011.  Because these are old messages, they have been migrated to storage that is probably near-online or off-line.  Because it takes so long to pull these messages up, the retrieval times out (by Yahoo, I presume... there's no control over this from the TB side is there?).

When I log into the Yahoo server to manually going back to old messages to delete them, I'm causing the OLD messages to get pulled into online storage in anticipation of my next move.  Then, when I run TB it now is going after messages that are ONLINE, not offline or near-online and the timeout does not occur.  So I'm betting Yahoo is the problem here in not setting its timeout timers longer than their worst-case retrieval times in their storage architecture.

Now, WHATEVER MADE YAHOO lose track of where it left off in TB downloads is a mystery, but this gets screwed up from time to time.  I have to let the 60000+ messages get pulled down until I get back to the present.  I'll leave 90 days of messages on the server from here on out so the next time this gets screwed up, it won't take so long to recover.

Comment 4

[Bev E]

Yahoo Customer Care reset the counter that tells POP where to start sending messages.  All 60000+ messages have to come down before I can get back to where I was.  No response on why there was a timeout.  I'm just letting them come down, stopping every 10,000 or so and restarting to make sure the counter is continuing to move along and the messages are being deleted on the server.  My other choice, recommended by Yahoo, was to move them to a separate folder so they wouldn't download.  That would require moving them 200 messages at a time. Ahem.  I suspect that's all I'll ever hear about this.  No explanation.  Does not appear to be a TB problem.

Comment 5

[Eric Moore]

If this is still a problem I suggest you consider replacing your Yahoo POP account with a Yahoo IMAP account, and uncheck tools -> account settings -> yahoo -> synchronization & storage -> "keep messages for this account on this computer", and disable global search/indexing in tools -> options -> advanced -> general. That way only the headers for each of your messages (in the IMAP account) will be downloaded. It will fetch the contents of a message as needed when you open a message, but it will not store it on your hard disk.

If you want to do this the first thing you need to do is to move any (downloaded) messages in your Yahoo POP account that you want to keep to Local Folders. Then delete the Yahoo POP account, add a Yahoo IMAP account, and change the two settings I mentioned. One nice side effect is that you will be able to use all of the folders in your webmail mailbox from Thunderbird, including the sent folder.  

You only need to read http://kb.mozillazine.org/Yahoo to do this, but might find http://kb.mozillazine.org/IMAP and http://kb.mozillazine.org/Minimize_the_size_of_a_profile useful. 

I'm going to mark this as a resolved / invalid bug report (it would be nicer to called it closed instead but the system doesn't support that) since you said its not due to Thunderbird.