Strange behavior on e-mail with invalid data in header

[gabor]

I have received an e-mail that apparently has something messed up
in the header. When I click on the message in the main TB window,
nothing shows up in the preview pane and the message remains
marked as unread, no matter how long it remains highlighted in the
message list.

I needed the information in this e-mail. So I saved it to disk
(this worked OK). Then I opened it with Outlook Express.
OE complained:

"There was an error opening this message. The message header
contains invalid data."

However the message opened and I was able to read it and save
attachments. In OE, each attachment showed up twice in the
attachment pane, but I'm not sure if this is due to the "invalid data"
or not.

Now comes the strange part. I tried to open the same message with
TB (the saved copy on the disk) and TB started to open up a series
of new windows. I'm not sure how many it would have opened if I
hadn't
gone into windows task manager and killed thunderbird.exe, but my
guess was that it was in some sort of infinite loop. It would seem to
me that this behavior is a bug, regardless of the malformed header.

I can't make the e-mail public because it contains some sensitive
data,
but I will try to see if I can form a subset of the email without the
sensitive data that still causes the bug to appear.

I'm running TB 2.0.0.9 on Windows XP sp1.

Regards,
Gabor

[ovidiu]

if the sensitive data is only in the body and attach, show the headers
or try to "edit as new" to see what happens..
to delimit what header stuff are the source of trouble..

[or.. why would you do that?]

[gabor]

When I show headers, I don't see anything unusual except that there is
a
line after the status that says "TimeOut". Here's the start of the
header:

X-Account-Key: account1
X-UIDL: 98F31AA2-B52C4D40-84086BBE-42ADF1A4
X-Mozilla-Status: 0000
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-
Keys:
X-x: TimeOut

If I double-click the message in the list, I see pretty much the same
thing as I saw in the preview pane, i.e. nothing. Also If I try to
edit the message as new I see nothing (no attachments, no body text).

It is interesting that opening the saved file has the infinite window
open loop, while opening the message in a new window within TB does
not.

If tried unsuccessfully to remove the bulk of the message without
removing the strange behavior.

One other thing. The message seems to have a copy of itself as
an attachment. This explains the dual attachments in Outlook
Express. If you look at the message in a text editor you see
the Mime attachments duplicated within the attached message
as well as the body text. I wonder if TB somehow gets into
a self-referencing loop due to this structure.

[Ron K.]

gabor keyboarded, On 2/1/2008 2:37 PM :

Do not forget to try using the View menu option of Message Source with
instances of a blank message pane. One of the causes of this is
presence of a MS Word winmail.dat attachment that the View > Message
Source ( a plain text view ) can show plus the text content. That
provides an option of using Edit > Copy to transfer highlighted content
to Clipboard for recovery.

--
Ron K.
Who is General Failure, and why is he searching my HDD?
Kernel Restore reported BSOD use by Major Error to msg the enemy!

[gabor]

That is useful. It's essentially the equivalent of saving the
message as a file and opening in a text editor (but much easier).
In my case the source message didn't have the dreaded winmail.dat,
although other messages from this particular sender did. It has
some JPEG attachments which show up as a bunch of base-64 encoded
ascii. As I said I was able to use Outlook Express to reconstruct
the attachments, and I found the message text in the saved
source.

The thing I was trying to report here was the annoying side-
effect of opening the saved message with TB, i.e. generating
an endless number of windows. That behavior seems like some-
thing worth fixing, IMHO.

Regards,
Gabor

[Ron K.]

gabor keyboarded, On 2/1/2008 5:03 PM :

What format did you use to save the message? Tb can save to and read-in
*.eml files.

[ovidiu]

could this help? (don't think so ,but..)
http://lookout.mozdev.org/

[gabor]

I saved the file as a *.eml, so the default double-click action
is to open it in TB, with the psychedelic result I mentioned
(cascading windows ad nauseum). Another point of interest showed
up when other recipients finally got their copy of the e-mail.
They are using Outlook and were not able to open or save the
mail at all due to "digital signature" issues (I don't recall the
exact error message from Outlook). If I manage to find a subset
of the mail that still creates the problem I'll post it.

Thanks for the help,
Gabor