TB 102.2.2 hanging on POP3 D/L of specific e-mails

[RayKremer]

Checking to see if anybody else is getting this, has suggestions, etc.

So my office uses TB for a shared POP3 account for general business communication with customers, and then a few of us in management have our own personal accounts.

Earlier in the week on my personal account, I was getting this message while trying to download:

"The account [account name] is being processed. Please wait until processing is complete to get messages."

Eventually discovered TB was getting hung up on a particular e-mail, and if I went in to our hosting provider's web mail (AT&T, if it matters) and removed the offending e-mail, TB just needed to be restarted and things were fine. It does seem to be something inherent to that one e-mail, though, because if I moved it back into the inbox in web mail, TB would hang on it again. Also happened on a few other mails that I also had to remove in web mail. All of which is annoying enough, but at least they were just spam.

So this morning one of my coworkers noted he had no e-mail from the past hour (referring to the shared account, now) and was getting this error message. I checked, the mail in my TB ended at the same point as his. Again, I went into web mail, found the next mail after the last one I'd received, moved it to a temp folder, and TB was back in business.

I've also confirmed that a third coworker whose TB has not yet updated to 102 downloaded the mail in question with no issue. Which means it's definitely a TB 102 bug. Related to what, I have no idea. There's no obvious correlation between the mails that TB 102 gets stuck on. My main concern is everybody's TB not being able to download random e-mails is going to rapidly become a big problem for us. (Everybody else's is going to automatically update to 102 at some point. Actually wait, I should just go disable that.)

I suppose this is more of a bugzilla type thing, but I've only added commentary to existing bugs there, never submitted a new bug, and I don't feel like I have enough information to be doing that anyway.

Does anybody have any similar experiences with 102, suggestions or advice, able to point me to other posts discussing this problem, ways to better diagnose the problem?

[tanstaafl]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Folder_being_processed (needs updating but the basics are still valid)

The error message you ran into is frequently caused by your anti-virus software. Its a frequent cause of many interoperability problems, in part because the vendors just can't keep up with the pace of Thunderbird releases.

"I've also confirmed that a third coworker whose TB has not yet updated to 102 downloaded the mail in question with no issue. Which means it's definitely a TB 102 bug."

Could be, but could also be due to a different configuration. Many Thunderbird bugs are configuration specific and Thunderbird has lots of regression bugs. You typically need a larger sample size to know what's going on.

Forgive me if I get on a soapbox.

You need to be aware that when a new major version is available on thunderbird.net its really just part of a unofficial extended field test due to the lack of testing resources. Its only when its gotten enough minor updates that they decide to enable automatic updating for everybody that its really considered ready for use. Even then you might want to wait a couple of minor release to let it get more mature (let other people discover the bugs) and give the add-on developers more time to update their add-ons. It depends upon whether you're comfortable being a early adapter (high risk of new bugs and some add-ons breaking but get new features and fixes for old bugs quicker) or need a production quality release.

Their release management policy is a very pragmatic way to deal with the shortage of testing resources. The problem is they don't explain it to users and also tell them you need to always use the latest version of Thunderbird due to security bugs. However, most of those security bugs require javascript to be enabled , which is disabled in Thunderbird mail accounts. Even the Mozilla Security Advisories for Thunderbird such as https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/ ... sa2022-26/ admit that.

A email client has quite different security vulnerabilities than a browser. Your main security risks are clicking on the wrong link (social engineering) and opening the wrong attachment unless you enable view -> display attachments inline (which is risky as that means you just gave up any opportunity to decide if an attachment is safe or not before opening it).

You might want to think about using a policy.json file to manage when automated updates are available. See viewtopic.php?f=39&t=3097548&hilit=policy.json

Nowadays you're usually better off using Windows Defender (which rarely has side effects and if it does you can configure it to exclude the Thunderbird profile) plus a separate program for malware such as Malwarebytes. Windows Defender is not one of the best AV but its gotten competitive, your email provider has already run something more powerful, and its a moot point since AV products nowadays have problems responding quickly to the latest threat. You want a layered defense model but the focus should be on anti-malware software that is quickly updated.

https://slate.com/technology/2017/02/wh ... ymore.html
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/ant ... antivirus/

Using a shared POP account rather than a shared IMAP account means you can't share the Sent folder. POP accounts can run into a logjam if they have problems downloading a specific message (usually due to bad headers) as Thunderbird isn't smart enough to display an error and then skip to the next message if that happens. You don't run into this with a IMAP account as you can just click on the next message you want to open. It has a client server view of the world unlike POP which has a download-centric view of the world.

Some people find a IMAP account too different (doesn't seem like a real mail account to them, and it has a additional learning curve) but be aware of the price you pay by sticking with POP. Thunderbird will probably never drop support for POP accounts but its a legacy technology. IMAP accounts have more features, less vulnerabilities and are designed to share the entire mailbox (all the webmail folders). You can use a message filter to automatically copy new mail to the inbox in Local Folders if you need to have a copy of a message stored on your PC.

Personally I run just Windows Defender plus a paid subscription to Malwarebytes.

[RayKremer]

Could be, but could also be due to a different configuration. Many Thunderbird bugs are configuration specific and Thunderbird has lots of regression bugs. You typically need a larger sample size to know what's going on.

Well, what's "larger"? I was out of town for two days prior to this, and TB on my laptop (not 102) downloaded everything just fine. Some of the mail that TB 102 at my office desk got hung on had been previously downloaded with no issue on my laptop. There's a total of six PCs in my office. Two got auto-updated to TB 102 and got hung up on the same e-mail this morning. Two are not TB 102 and downloaded that mail with no issue. The remaining are the file server where we only download mail every couple of months (to clear out the shared POP3 inbox on the server) and the PC of an employee that is on vacation and so was not in active use.

So, whatever. I'm not being flippant or jumping to conclusions when I say this is 99% definitely caused by TB 102. It's also clearly not a TB configuration issue if I can solve and recreate the problem merely by moving the offending e-mail in and out of the server inbox.

It depends upon whether you're comfortable being a early adapter (high risk of new bugs and some add-ons breaking but get new features and fixes for old bugs quicker) or need a production quality release.

I generally have TB set to automatic updates, and I have no interest in messing around with beta versions. I don't choose when to update, I leave it to the whims of the software. I've definitely noticed that when an update starts going out, some of the PCs here in the office get it many days before the others do. Honestly, this isn't the first time I've had to scramble to make sure everybody else doesn't get an auto-update, usually related to a plug-in that we make significant use of but occasionally breaks due to a new TB update. Which isn't the TB devs' fault, it's just a question of giving the plug-in dev time to make the relevant adjustments. Sometime it's even already been done by the time we start getting the TB update that causes the issue.

Whatever. I'm not anti-update, but I just want everything to work. Maybe once this TB 102 bug is fixed I should leave updates off forever? Well, not really, but I don't even know why we're talking about this. I expect TB devs to not push something to the auto-updates until it's ready for primetime. New bugs still happen, sure. But then they need to be fixed ASAP, which also means working together to identify them and their cause.

With all due respect, I'm not looking for speculation here. I'm looking to see if others can correlate this happening. Especially since it's clearly a very intermittent problem and it does indeed sound like I'm a bit crazy.

Using a shared POP account rather than a shared IMAP account means you can't share the Sent folder.

Not relevant. We self-BCC all outgoing messages. Also not relevant to my TB 102 bug problem, beyond the fact that having the shared account is what gave me awareness that the problem only affected users that had auto-updated to TB 102.

POP accounts can run into a logjam if they have problems downloading a specific message (usually due to bad headers) as Thunderbird isn't smart enough to display an error and then skip to the next message if that happens. You don't run into this with a IMAP account as you can just click on the next message you want to open.

I also didn't run into this with TB that isn't version 102. Otherwise I'd love to hear theories involving bad headers and such. If there's some kind of bad header issue that TB 102 chokes on yet the previous version doesn't, I consider that a downgrade or a bug.

be aware of the price you pay by sticking with POP.

I feel like I went to a tire store to get a flat tire replaced on my internal combustion engine car and the salesman spent half the time trying to convince me to go buy an electric car rather than replacing the tire.

Personally I run just Windows Defender plus a paid subscription to Malwarebytes.

And then told me what brand of floor mats I should buy.

Thanks for your input.