901993 - Bogus Timeout error message displayed when sending mail

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Networking: SMTP, defect)

Description

[Alain Knaff]

Under some unknown condition, which are certainly NOT a timeout, the following message is popped up:


Sending of message failed.
The message could not be sent because the connection to SMTP server xxx.com timed out. Try again or contact your network administrator.


Why am I so sure that it is not actually a timeout? Easy: it shows up within milliseconds of clicking Send. Usually timeouts are longer than that.

Unfortunately this happens on a corporate desktop, running Windows, so there is no out-of-band way to find out what really is going on (no tcpdump available, no nothing...)

Usually this only happens once, when clicking "Send" a second time, the message goes through.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Alain Knaff from comment #0)
> ...
> Usually this only happens once, when clicking "Send" a second time, the
> message goes through.

Was likely your ISP.
The problem is gone?

Comment 2

[Alain Knaff]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, use Needinfo for questions) from comment #1)
> (In reply to Alain Knaff from comment #0)
> > ...
> > Usually this only happens once, when clicking "Send" a second time, the
> > message goes through.
> 
> Was likely your ISP.

By what mechanism would my ISP be able to mislead Thunderbird into thinking much more time has passed that did really pass? Yeah, conceivably the ISP (or company) *could* send that Windows desktop a bogus NTP packet to make its clock jump just at the right time, but somehow Occam's razor tells me it's just a mismatched error message, like there are so many others all over Firefox and Thunderbird.

> The problem is gone?

Hard to tell. I no longer work there...

However, there are plenty of other cases of bogus error messages around (see bug #1240722 for a more recent example)

Comment 3

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard and Comment 2