Using oct16 mn6 commercial branch build Mac OS 9.0 I'm logging this bug to gather information on the Unknown Error alert appearing at random times. Note: there are a couple instances where we know we can generate the same alert text logged separately as bug 56911 and bug 32443. 1. I've been seeing it fairly frequently on the oct16 commercial branch build on Mac whenever I'm getting mail on a POP account (new profile). 2. Peter Mock saw it yesterday with Oct16 commercial branch build Mac while reading a news message (profile was IMAP and news account). 3. Steve Rudman sent an email that he was seeing it frequently with no apparent reason when he was on Oct09 NT (branch?) build.

Esther also got this alert today when loggin in/getting mail on her POP account with Mac oct16 branch build.

FYI: still seeing this quite a bit on new profiles using oct30 morning branch commercial build with mac OS 9.0.

*** Bug 57591 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I'm getting "unknown error" whenever I try to check my mail under Linux. Same profile under Netcape 4.x works fine. I am behind a SOCKS5 firewall. Sending mail doesn't work either. I even tried converting my addresses to IPs.

I'm seeing this each and every time I do a Get Msg on Mac OS 9.0 POP accounts using Nov15th commercial trunk build. Message(s) arrive intact, but I get the unknown error every time.

nominating mail3

I often see "Unknown error" while reading a news with Win98 build.

I am still experiencing this problem with 2000121112 trunk on Mac OS 9.0.4 My experience is the same as described in the earlier comment from laurel@netscape.com 2000-11-15 17:06, except that I get the error message most of the time when I check mail, but not every time.

I disagree with the mail3 keyword. In my case, following this error nothing at all happens. This isn't a feature request... it is a show stopper! I repeat: it is impossible for me to check my mail or send mail using Mozilla. I have a SOCKS5 firewall and I'm using Linux. It could be that this bug is an umbrella to various other bugs and at this point, it is very difficult to tell them apart because the error message is *not* informative enough! Please people, put some more info there so that I can help you! (Mozilla works fine under Windows for the same machine. I only have a problem with the Linux version, I'm sure I'm not alone!)

Daniel Lemire, please check, if your server setup is correct. That is only relevant in so far as this bug makes troubleshooting hard to impossible. For this reason, I agree that this is not a feature request. Meaningful error msgs are a base requirement. Nominating for mozilla1.0.

My settings appear to be exactly the same as Netscape 4.75 (Linux) and they were automatically generated from my Netscape configuration (I did check over the proxy/SOCKS host settings though). There are a few simple tests I can do to show that nothing works. For example, I can try to send mail. SMTP is simple enough right? Well, I get "sending of message failed" each and every time. I bet this is the same problem... and again as this bug. I don't know what happens. My guess is that Mozilla never connects to the servers. I did check however that both HTTP and FTP work through my firewall. How come SMTP and POP3 don't work? They use SOCKS to connect whereas HTTP and FTP use their respective proxies? Clearly, it is a problem with SOCKS... If I'm right, the error message should go like this... "Could not connect to server 89890890890890, check your SOCKS host configuration" Normally, the software should know it is using SOCKS, it should not it could not work with the current SOCKS host and should tell you so.

nominating for next release with newer keyword. Update: using dec20 trunk build mac OS 9.0 I'm seeing this each and every time I get new mail.

marking nsbeta1+ and moving to mozilla0.8

reassigning to sspitzer

There seem to be two different situations in this bug. One, on Mac, the error msg is displayed after mail has arrived all right, where the error is occuring rather randomly.(1 out of 5 to 6 in my experience) The other one is on Linux where Mozilla can not receive a msg. I think the latter case should be separated from this bug, and this bug should be marked Mac only.

moving to mozilla0.9

FYI: Just create a brand new profile, with only one news profile. Just got the "unknown error". The last commands in my nntp log: 0[3460f0]: Next state: NNTP_READ_ARTICLE 0[3460f0]: Next state: NEWS_DONE 0[3460f0]: Next state: NEWS_FREE "Unknown error" occured around the NEWS_FREE command..

If this is at all reproducible, we could add the error code itself to this message which would help us track down the problem, though it might confuse the users a little bit more. But I guess "Unknown error" is bad enough, an 8 digit error code can't hurt much. I'll attach a patch that will cause the error code to get displayed in hex, which should help us track this down.

Will this patch get checked in? Otherwize, no help from my side...:( Sorry The wierd thing is that the "unknown error" doesn't show up in the NSPR_LOG. I'm currently logging "IMAP:5,POP:5,NNTP:5,SMTP:5" and the "unknown error" doesn't show up there.

I'm hoping to get r= and sr= from sspitzer and mscott to check this in.

sr=mscott

r=sspitzer, on that patch.

Bienvenu, an error msg "Unknown error" as roughly as bad as it can get - an error code is definitely an improvement. Users can then reports this code to us, we can debug and can then help the user.

I've checked in the patch this morning, so you should see an error code with the Unknown error msg starting in builds from tonight.

The code for build 2001012510 on Mac OS 9.1 is 80004005. What does that mean?

unfortunately, it's NS_ERROR_FAILURE. Not very informative. We could start replacing various general errors with specific error codes.

Are we sure that this error comes from mail, and not sidebar http fx?

I'm also getting "80004005"

ups.. too quick: Now I just got: 80520012

easy way to reproduce 80520012: 1) select "local folders" 2) create a new folder called test in "local folders" 3) create a subfolder of test also called test 4) highlight top test folder and press delete and answer yes 4) open trash folder and highlight test 5) delete folder test 6) open trash folder again and highlight folder test again 7) press delete and "unknown error 80520012"

That's NS_MSG_CANT_CREATE_FOLDER - my guess is that we're still trying to create "test" again under the trash, though we shouldn't be. I'll open a bug on Navin for that.

bug 66676 is filed for the problem Gemal reproduced.

*** Bug 66776 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

FWIW: I get 80004005 in a folder that contains only filtered messages. Sometimes deleted messages re-appear, sometime one message contains the body text of two mails.

If it's any help, when there are new messages the alert seems to appear before the biff sound plays.

I assume that NS_ERROR_FAILURE is just as bad as "unknown error", i.e. the bug is not yet fixed. I know that you intend to work on this bug soon, nevertheless I feel the urge to state its importance, remembering my pain with this bug in other software: <rant> One of my hobbies in computers is to install and try out new software. I do that since 10 years now and covered almost any genre of software - Windows device drivers, Linux distro installers, server-based VoIP<->ISDN gateways, whatever. One of the major patterns I see in most of my headaches and resulting wasted time is the lack of good error reporting. If something just fails with a meaningless error msg, or, worse, without error, all I can do is check all causes I can image. (Or dump the software.) Needless to say that this is extremely time-consuming and frustrating, often even unsuccessful. *I* and probably most other Mozilla testers know enough about computers so we can quickly limit the problem to a certain area (e.g. wrong login data or missing network connection), but most of our users don't. So, assume that the people reporting problems here in this bug are only the tip of the iceberg and that there are many users scratching their heads about the problems or wanting to throw our software into the trashcan. </rant> Thus, IMO, it is a mustfix for Mozilla 1.0 to remove almost any NS_ERROR_FAILURE reported to the user and to replace it with something meaningful. Also, is there a bug to translate the error code into human language?

I reported earlier that the alert comes up before the biff sound, but it seems like it can happen after the biff sound too.

*** Bug 67212 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I frequently get the 80004005 error on win98SE while on the secnews.netscape.com news server. I'm going along reading messages in various groups, then click on a message in the threadpane and wham! After getting the first error, I get it on every message I try to access. I don't see it trying to download my pop mail. BTW, I'm using dial-up connection, no proxy. Sometimes just closing mail-news (leaving the browser still open) and starting it up again clears it. Sometimes I have to shut down mozilla completely.

On Mac OS 9.1 build 2001012608 I have been blessed with the following error: 80470002. Any idea what that code translates to in English?

David - should we create a bug that lists the error codes and what they mean? Might help in being a good reference.

I've seen this on linux. this is mac and linux and not windows, right? I think this is a duplicate of #66956

I think a web page with the error codes might be a better idea. When I get a chance, I'll send you some of the popular error codes.

This single bug report seems to include reports for many different problems: various error codes associated with POP mail, SOCKS, news, etc. Perhaps these should be separated into different reports. The only instance of this bug I have seen (and not coincidentally, the instance I find most annoying) is unknown error 80004005 when checking or retrieving POP mail on Mac OS 9.x.

The 80004005 error on retrieving POP mail in Mac OS 9.x seems to have gone away for me in 2001020708.

that's good; it sounds like it was the line termination problem, which Navin fixed a few days ago.

I'm getting this one constantly with NT4sp6a and build 2001021420... After I start to read news, I begin to get the 80004005 every time Moz checks for new mail. It still downloads the mail successfully (AFAICT) as others have noted on the Mac.

*** Bug 69351 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I am not able to reproduce this "unknown error" when I download msgs on POP on Mac. laurel are you still seeing this.

I too no longer see unknown error 80004005 when downloading mail from a POP server on Mac OS 9.1 with build 2001021502.

*** Bug 67212 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

using buildid: 2001021904 on mac. No errors while checking new mail for pop account. I tried to get new mail from both get message as well as biff to fetch the new mail.

I saw this error in 022304 build for MacOS after some difficulty getting connected via PPP and check mail in POP failed.

I'm still getting 80004005 errors on win32 build 2001030505, win98SE I believe it is occurring when I'm in a newsgroup and the check for new mail is done. After the error occurs, I can no longer access any ng messages and have to shut down mail. This is bad.

Unknow error problem reappeared on mac with bug 70476. This bug is fixed now. I have commercial build 2001030508 and I am not seeing any unknown error appear. I have created new profiles, sent mail, etc. May be you are getting bit by bug 70476. Please download a later build and see if you still see it. Thanks.

moving to mozilla0.9.1

*** Bug 74081 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

from bug 57057 -------------------------------------- Well, after the bug for too many connections got fixed and i could finally use news again, I came across the message "Unknown error 80004005" in an "Alert" moz dialog box. After hitting OK (the only button available) everything seems to work fine. This bug is somewhat related to bug 65927 in that when i used to get too many connections errors after a few minutes i'd get the unknown error alert and then I could browse again. Its almost as if the error pops up when a connection gets freed or dropped from my news server. Nothing gets put into the news log at this error that i can see, so i don't know whats going on. tested using build 2001032904 ------------------------------------------------

sorry... thats from bug 74081

My configuration: Win2000, POP3, SOCKS firewall. I leave messages on the server. Duplicated with with 03-08-01, 03-30-01, and 04-02-01 nightly builds. Click "Get Msg." Mozilla icon begins cycling. "Receiving: message 1 of 22" After about a minute the bottom status line changes to "Document: Done (0.578 secs)" Well over five minutes pass; mozilla icon continues cycling, new messages don't appear. Then the "unknown error 80004005" message box appears. The status line has changed to: "Document: Done (587.782 secs) The particular email messages on the server are important to reproduce this. My work around is to telnet into the POP3 server and start deleting messages until I delete the one that confuses Mozilla. I haven't been able to capture a particular email message yet which reproduces the problem.

Could it be related to messages that have lines that start with "."? Those are escaped by the pop server, and we have to handle it correctly. If we get confused by the size, we could keep spinning waiting for data. Just a guess. You could try sending yourself a plain text message with a bunch of lines starting with "." and see if we mess up.

It looks like there are several different "bugs" here that are causing the Unknown error messages. One appears to be related to Mail/News getting a connection timed out. I have it on news where I'll read a message and then after about a minute I'll get the "Unknown Error 80004005" If I read two messages I'll get two alerts after about a minute of inactivity. Here's where it gets interesting though... If I open several messages and read through them quickly, I may only get three alerts after the minute wait. This i think is due to the new connection cache where we reuse old connections. So at most I have 3 news connections which time out about a minute after im done reading. If this (and its cousing the "reading newsgroup and then check for new mail") bug are the two main ones involved, should we spin them off into two new bugs blocking this one? That way we can troubleshoot those individually and use this bug to worry about the more serious "Unknown" crasher bugs.

Unknown Error 80470002 seems to appear when I am deleting multiple e-mails (possibly unread e-mails?) from a folder other than inbox. Recently it appeared 29 times in a row. My guess was that it was once per unread e-mail. But at least it has stopped crashing when this happens. (This was the common pre-0.8.1 occurance.) However, this was the first time that I actually wrote down the error number, so it is possible that at other times the error number was something else.

I am getting this message very frequently. It appears to be some sort of corruption of my Inbox or any number of other folders. New messages which come in are selectable, but older messages in my Inbox are now giving this error (80470002). Twice I have tried to clear my Inbox, and it indeed does clear, and for a while, I have an empty Inbox and I am able to read new messages which come in. But after many openings and closings of Mozilla, eventually, my old Inbox messages magically reappear (this despite my doing a "Compact Folders" very frequently), and then this offensive error message is back. There is a message in my Inbox that I REALLY need to get access to, hopefully I can recover it once someone figures out what's going on. I am using nightly build (2001041308) on Linux.

Bryan, have you tried deleting your Inbox.msf file? Also, you can open your Inbox with a text editor and search for the message if you need to see it.

Bienvenu, Yes, I deleted my Inbox.msf file, and upon doing so, my Inbox appears to be cleaned up. I just tried it again and it seems to have resolved it. However, I have tried this before, and ultimately the "phantom messages" came back. At this point I am unsure whether, when they came back, the actual messages were there, or just headers (not knowing how Mail-News stores things internally). Re: editing my Inbox via a text editor -- yes I am aware of that, however in one particular case what I really needed was a file attachment to a messages, which isn't so easy (for me) to extract. A little while ago I saw the header of the message in my Inbox, but could not click it (when I tried, I got the 80047002 message). Now, however, (after deleting Inbox.msf), the phantom-message-with-the-attachment-I-need isn't appearing on the list anymore; so maybe it has been long gone, I'm just not sure. Bryan

*** Bug 77655 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 78354 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

For those that are seeing this error, do you have news biff set? I've seen this a couple of time when news.mozilla.org went down and it checked for messages automatically.

I'm current using 2001050406 build. Since the last few builds that passed the smoke test, I stopped getting the "unknown error 80004005". Thank God, it was driving me nuts.

moving to 0.9.2

*** Bug 80737 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

moving to 0.9.3

*** Bug 89123 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Gail White was on a cable modem dialed into work with sera. She was in Mail when suddenly the network disconneted her, and sera and received an "Unknown error 80004005" message with an OK button. Branch build win32 2001-07-11-06 on Win 2K

Have see this alert "Unknown Error 80470002" ... When ? I'have delete all my e-mail in the Inbox folder. After, move one of then back to the Inbox, from the Trash. The popup appears when I'm trying to open the mail back. (On mozilla 0.9.2)

Had an amzing adventure with "unknown error 80470002" under 0.9.2 on Windows 98 2nd edition (4.10.2222). Downloaded and installed the latest nighly (2001071408) - mail rebuilt my inbox index and now everythings just beautiful, so for all the 80470002ers out there: try an Asa approved build from http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/ or try the latest nightly. Also, use Moz's mail only for testing purposes (he sheepishly said downloading 4.77 and not about to trust Moz mail again any time soon).

in reply to Jeandré who wrote recently: >Also, use Moz's mail only for testing purposes (he sheepishly said downloading >4.77 and not about to trust Moz mail again any time soon). i have been using mozillamail since M18. since then (dec2000), it screwed up my correspondence once. (all emails & profile information 'gone'). however, the files that store the information were never deleted or garbled. the people developing the mail client were very concerned about helping me with getting my correspondence back, so that i quickly was able to use mozillamail again. i have not lost one email. of course it would be nice to have a stand-by email program if mozilla _should_ screw up. but i believe apart from some smaller bugs the 092 mailer is rather stable. i don't think bug finding is very effective if you use mozilla every now and then for testing. that's why i use it everyday. of course it's beta. keep your old 4.x mail files and make a backup copy of your mozilla profile directory every now and then and there's nothing to fear ;-)

*** Bug 91228 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Marking mostfreq at 10 dups.

I might be repeating some info here... I found myself getting UE#80470002 on my inbox, when trying to view certain messages. I inspected my Inbox file and found that the messages involved weren't in the file: no trace, not even of header info. This might be indicative of some bigger problem. I'm using trunk build 2001072603 on Win98SE, btw.

i _sometimes get this error on mail startup when i am not connected to the network (use dial-up) and it tries to receive that welcome msg. same prob as rom scalkins@netscape.com reported a few messages ago (2001-07-13 12:40) i use: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010628

If you want to file the starting up offline bug as a new bug, I'll take it if mailnews doesn't want to qa it. I'm working on a general connectivity test suite.

I'm also getting 80470002. This happens when I move mail: 1.- In local folders, I move mails from one folder to another 2.- Then, trying to look to the mails at the new location will get the error with _some_ emails, not all. 3.- Mails seems to have attachment, for example I can see some emails with a cutted gif imaged because the attachment perhaps is corrupted. 4.- I can sent you a folder file that shows the error if you wish. 5.- Using 0.9.3 does not solve the corrupted mail by 0.9.2 Hope this helps

UE#80004005 is driving people nuts in the snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.netscape6.windows newsgroup. I see it every time I post to the secure server.

moving to 0.9.6

does this still happen? a while ago I made it so we wouldn't throw up any alerts that we didn't have a string for. (we'd assert, to let developers know to fix their code).

if we're unable to reproduce this anymore, I'd mark this a dup of #86556

I haven't seen this one for quite a while.

I no longer see this alert.

great, then I'm going to mark this as a dup of 86556 and then if anyone has a debug build and sees this, they should file a bug when they get an assertion. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 86556 ***

verified as dup