950193 - [Email][V1.3][POP3] Cannot synchronize the latest mails

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::E-Mail, defect)

Description

[William Hsu [:whsu]]

* Description:
  When email app completed the synchronization of Gmail account which had many mails, I always cannot get the latest mails.
  You can refer to the following video to know the bug.
  - https://dc1.safesync.com/LMsJysyJ/WP_20131214_006.mp4?a=UsvngiOQsMQ


* Precondition:
  - A Gmail account which had many emails (500+).

* Reproduction steps:
  1. Adding the Gmail account on the email app and select the POP3 protocol
  3. Go to inbox to synchronize the mails
  4. Checking the inbox

* Expected result:
  Email app can synchronize the latest mails

* Actual result:
  Email app cannot synchronize the latest mails

* Test build:(V1.3)
 - Gaia:     588a3e02c4ace3b3341ba1f6bb7274120b53b2b3
 - Gecko:    http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/rev/031270be3702
 - BuildID   20131212004003
 - Version   28.0a2

Comment 1

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

This is a gmail POP3 issue.  It won't tell you about all your messages.  My gmail test account has 6048 messages in the inbox.  When gmail is configured to tell me about all messages, the POP3 UIDL only tells me about 902 of them, apparently covering the time range from ~ July 2nd through Oct 10th.

Our initial sync overflow case from bug 939375 is doing the right thing, though, as we are taking the numerically largest messages which do indeed correlate with newer messages.

In any event, this is one of the reasons we absolutely don't support POP3 on gmail.  In general, we don't support POP3 on any server that supports IMAP, but gmail's custom implementation with weird (if clever) windowing behaviours and special semantics means that anything having to do with gmail and synchronization is likely to be invalid.  I suggest using a more traditional dovecot server implementation or possibly cyrus (like fastmail.fm)

Comment 2

[William Hsu [:whsu]]

Yes! This is Gmail behavior. But... I don't think "FxOS user" know the behavior.
If FxOS user meet the situation, our users only think this is FxOS bug.
Please stand in user's shoes.
Thanks!

Comment 3

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

(In reply to William Hsu [:whsu] from comment #2)
> Yes! This is Gmail behavior. But... I don't think "FxOS user" know the
> behavior.
> If FxOS user meet the situation, our users only think this is FxOS bug.
> Please stand in user's shoes.
> Thanks!

It's okay if the users think it's a bug in FxOS.  When they go to investigate the bug and check our support or documentation resources, they will hopefully discover why we don't support this use-case.  In the event that they do file a bug, we will mark the bug INVALID or WONTFIX and point them at the rationale for us not supporting it.

I have updated https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Email/Features#POP3 to help clarify our rationale, which is this:

IMAP is a much better protocol for the user, the server, and the Firefox OS device. We have a very finite amount of developer resources for the e-mail client, and we think our efforts are best spent improving our IMAP protocol support (or any successor to the IMAP protocol that improves on it.) 


Since we are an open source project, we would also consider enhancement patches for POP3, but only if they came with excellent unit test coverage and a promise of engineering support from the contributor(s) for some extended period of time to help offset the burden of the added permutations the e-mail back-end would have to deal with.