Thunderbird freezing when opening post with large photos

[Timoke]

Thunderbird is freezing when trying to open a mail that has large photos as attachment, about 6 mb.

It simply gets stuck somehow trying to load the mail and the longer you wait, more stuck it gets. At first it is possible to quickly select some other mail so it stops the freezing process but if waiting longer, it still is not loading the mail and gets completely frozen and only way to close it is to kill it.

Does this on three different computers. Thunderbird is the newest version and the problem has existed for quite some time now.

[DanRaisch]

What is the specific version of Thunderbird you are using? (Newest version is too ambiguous to be useful.)
How is the account set up, as POP or IMAP? In Thunderbird the menu path is Tools->Account Settings->Server Settings->Server Type at the top right of the dialogue.
How much memory is installed on that Win 7 system?

[Timoke]

Newest version number is 91.10.0 but I did not specify it since this has been happening for at least a year now.

Accounts are POP accounts, using four accounts on same TB. Accounts are very old, 15-20 years, but I always have archived mails by year, keeping only the current year in normal inbox.

Same thing happening on three different computers. One is on Win7 system with 16 gb ram, and two are W10s with 8 gb ram.

Just tried with this fourth one, this one is Win 10 with 16gb ram and same freeze happening.

Also have tried with and without addons and reinstalling TB.

[DanRaisch]

What is the size of the Thunderbird folder in which these large photos are stored? Have you tried compacting the message folder? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_: ... ng_Folders

[Timoke]

Tried with all four profiles with different sized folders, smallest is under 1gb and largest it a bit under 10gb, two in between. I always compact the folders after archiving older mails and when ever it tells me to when deleting stuff worth 200mb.

Is there some kind of limit how large photos TB can handle? So far it has been fine with photos up to around 4 mb size but these 6 mb+ photos are causing problems. Annoying that phones are taking larger and larger photos all the time and many people do not know how to make them smaller when sending.

[tanstaafl]

I'm not aware of a size limit for a message or attachment other than those imposed by email providers. Frequently they allow up to three attachments, with a maximum message size of 25MB.

I just sent a message with a 7MB and a 6.8MB attachment (13.8MB total) with no problems.

[Timoke]

Yeah the total size isn't a problem, single photo size is. Have been happily opening stuff up to 25mb which is some kind of general limit for many email servers. It's just the photos that are too big.

Is there some email I can forward the problematic photos as an example for study purposes? They're not any secrets

[tanstaafl]

You could upload the image to a free image sharing site such as https://postimages.org and post a link to it. "Images uploaded by both anonymous uploads and free accounts are limited to 24Mb and 10k x 10k pixels." I suggest you chose "do not resize my image" and "no expiration" .

If you do that I'd save the image and try using it in a email message to duplicate the problem.

[Timoke]

Okay that sounds good.

https://postimg.cc/9wdyTk7x
https://postimg.cc/3y04m6Mg

I did save them as original but still it seems to make them smaller tho. Original photo size was 6mb and 6,5mb but that service changed them into 3,8mb. Probably they work just fine

[tanstaafl]

The download original image button didn't work in Vivaldi (Chrome clone) but did in Firefox.

No problem sending a message with the two attachments from my Fastmail IMAP account to my Gmail IMAP account. The attachments in the received message look fine and have the same size as what was sent. An excerpt from the raw message source:

Subject: test attachment size limit with 2 large photos

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------mc7QdchQzm8ABNduIqCdQpGj
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

3.8MB + 4.2MB

--------------mc7QdchQzm8ABNduIqCdQpGj
Content-Type: image/jpeg; charset=windows-1252; name="20220616-093037.jpg"
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="20220616-093037.jpg"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64


....big block of hexadecimal characters due to base64 encoding....


--------------mc7QdchQzm8ABNduIqCdQpGj
Content-Type: image/jpeg; charset=windows-1252; name="20220616-093057.jpg"
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="20220616-093057.jpg"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64


....big block of hexadecimal characters due to base64 encoding....

[Timoke]

Okay, looks like I guessed right that they work fine when their size decreased. They open normally for me too.

Oh well, I suppose this will remain a mystery and hopefully solves itself at some point and have to work around it until that.

Thanks for testing and replying


Btw, these are the errors that the error console gives when this freeze happens.

"Image corrupt or truncated."

and sometimes

"[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x805e0006 [nsIChannel.asyncOpen]" nsresult: "0x805e0006 (<unknown>)" location: "JS frame :: resource:///modules/FaviconLoader.jsm :: load :: line 191" data: no]"