derek fong Reporter
	Description • 20 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040825 Camino/0.8.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040825 Camino/0.8.1

Similar to the issue reported in bug 222830, Thunderbird silently times out when
making a POP connection to a mail server that takes "a long time" to
authenticate. (No joke -- one of the POP servers I access can take up to two
minutes to simply authenticate me.)

I have access to the server's logs and can confirm that it is Thunderbird that
is dropping the connection prematurely, not the remote server.

Two issues here:

1. Thunderbird should ideally provide a way of either specifying the timeout
value or leaving it out altogether by default.

2. Thunderbird should NOT silently abort the connection attempt. An error dialog
would be more appropriate.

The second point is probably as important as the first. A user could go days
before noticing that Thunderbird isn't even checking mail anymore (this happened
to me).


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Attempt a POP connection to a server that takes over a minute to authenticate
your login attempt.

Actual Results:  
Mail is not retrieved for the affected POP account(s), and Thunderbird does not
display any warnings or error messages.

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should handle these situations better by allowing for a user-defined
timeout value (in an "Advanced" preference pane or something similar), and by
alerting users to failures with an error dialog instead of silently aborting the
connection attempt.

	derek fong Reporter
	Comment 1 • 20 years ago

BTW, this is occuring with Thunderbird version 0.9 (20041103) running under Mac
OS X 10.3.6.

	David :Bienvenu
	Comment 2 • 20 years ago

you can set the hidden pref "mail.pop3_response_timeout" in your profile
directory's prefs.js, to 180 seconds or so, to allow for you server's long
connection time - something like: user_pref(""mail.pop3_response_timeout", 180);

	Arthur
	Comment 3 • 20 years ago

Does the status bar indicate the failure? Error dialogs bring a lot of other
problems with them.

	derek fong Reporter
	Comment 4 • 20 years ago

Thanks for the tip, David.  That did the trick, although a UI for changing the
timeout value would be more helpful.

Arthur, there is absolutely no indication that checking mail failed at all.  The
status bar simply changes from "Host contacted, waiting for reply..." to
nothing, and the "in progress" spinner simply stops.  If an error dialog is not
an option, then maybe a little icon next to the mailbox in question to indicate
some sort of warning/error with an option to see the actual error message that
Thunderbird is reporting.

	Ling Qi
	Comment 5 • 20 years ago

Want to chime in that the about:config extension can be used to modify the
timeout property.

That said, a particular server I use takes about three and half minutes between
PASS and "+OK user has nnnn message." This gets tricky as to how long the
*DEFAULT* timeout should be. As far as I know Mail on the Moz suite never had
this problem. Does anybody know the default timeout on that one?

Agreed that something should be shown to the user as to what happened instead of
just time out silently.

	WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency
	Comment 6 • 20 years ago

Set Bug 127461 to "Depends on:" of this bug, because mail.pop3_response_timeout
was introduced by Bug 127461.

	Julian Hall
	Comment 7 • 20 years ago

I'm seeing the same behaviour on Win2K on a PC, so the hardware and OS should be
set to 'All' by someone who has permission to do that.

There are many POP3 servers that take a long time to authenticate, as it is
common practice to read and parse the entire mail box at this stage.  As you can
imagine, with a mailbox containing 4,500 items totalling over 40Mb (as one of
mine currently does), this is far from an instantaneous process.  I would
recommend adding a UI and error message as soon as possible for this, but as an
immediate change increasing the default timeout which seems to be 30 seconds or
thereabouts, so that fewer people experience the problem.

	Ling Qi
	Comment 8 • 20 years ago

(In reply to comment #7)
> ... default timeout which seems to be 30 seconds or thereabouts

The default for Thunderbird 1.0 is 45 seconds.

	WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency
	Comment 9 • 20 years ago

To all reporters of the problem:

Is it really timeout during "Authentication"?
Isn't it same situation as Bug 270014 Comment #9 or Bug 273369 Comment #8?
(If authentication failure, I think error message is usually issued.)

Get POP3 protocol log and see it.
See http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html#pop for
protocol log.
(See also Bug 227981 if Mac OS X. Command line way is required when Mac OS X.)
Do not forget to change "protocol:5" to "POP3:5" when POP3.
Please note that log file is overlayed on restart.

	adam_bielanski
	Comment 10 • 20 years ago

I have similar problem with WinXP - and it drives me crazy. I have a busy POP
server that requires over 2min. timeout. Make this opion visible, please.

	Gervase Markham [:gerv]
	Comment 11 • 19 years ago

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

	Gervase Markham [:gerv]
	Comment 12 • 19 years ago

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.

	benc
	Comment 13 • 16 years ago

REOPEN:

I think this is describing a specific failure in the event model, and unless there is a clear resolution, enough people are saying this happens where this bug should not be expired.

	Julian Hall
	Comment 14 • 16 years ago

Confirm this is still happening.  We do now get an error message, which is an improvement, but there is still no UI for setting the preference, and the manual setting doesn't seem to be working for me any more; has the name of the pref been changed?

	Julian Hall
	Comment 15 • 16 years ago

In fact, looking at the source code, the code that reads the pref (which was in the Initialize method of nsPop3Protocol in aviary 1.0) has been removed, and I can't find a replacement anywhere.  Has the facility to vary the timeout from 45 seconds been totally removed since this bug was filed?

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 16 • 16 years ago

Julian are you using TB2 or Tb3?

from bug 277071 comment 3 (the bug has other good comments)
"mail.pop3_response_timeout is now obsolete/deprecated. mailnews now uses
one pref, mailnews.tcptimeout for all our timeouts (imap/pop3/nntp/smtp...). And
now you should get an alert on a timeout."

my mailnews.tcptimeout is set at 100, but I don't know whether that's the default

I don't find any bugs in pop regarding missing error message ... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=anywordssubstr&short_desc=alert+error+time&product=MailNews+Core&product=Thunderbird&component=Networking%3A+POP&resolution=---&chfieldto=Now&field0-0-0=short_desc&type0-0-0=anywordssubstr&value0-0-0=

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 17 • 15 years ago

-> component=pop

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 18 • 12 years ago

Noop, is this something you could test?

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 19 • 8 years ago

I don't see evidence that this is still a legit issue