Thunderbird race/hang/hung condition in High Sierra 10.13.6
Running a new iMac pro here and Thunderbird has been a disaster. I've been using it for years on my PC, and other Mac's in the past. The iMac has tons of ram and plenty of disk space. The system is otherwise idle when using Thunderbird.
The Race condition is repeatable. When it happens, I get the spinning beach ball as the program is completely hung. The only way out is to terminate the process.
Steps to repeat the condition:
1. Open an existing email 2. Hit Reply 3. Compose message 4. Hit Send, and then, quickly, 5. Choose another message to read 6. Application hang
What's happening here is that when a message is being sent, opening a new message before the sending has completed causes a race/hang condition. It is highly repeatable.
Workaround: after hitting Send, wait until it's been sent before moving on to another message.
All Replies (8)
In version 60.3.3?
The 60.3.3 just arrived on my system. In installed it and absolutely confirmed that the problem still exists. NO CHANGE
Thanks though!
SO you are saying you are moving to another message before the send completes. How do you do that exactly?
After composing an email, you click on the Send button. The compose window disappears fairly quickly. I'll presume that the SMTP sending routine is spun off in another thread so that the mail delivery can take place in the background. Just as soon as the compose window is gone, I click into the received messages area, attempting to open my next email. I might be impatient and click on two or three message headers, but at that instant, after I've clicked one or two message headers, and while (I believe) Send is still going on in the background, the entire GUI hangs with the spinning beach ball. The behavior is highly repeatable.
I have learned through experimentation that if I take my time after hitting Send, and wait a few seconds or so, that the problem does not occur. I believe that this pause gives the system time to catch up.
The problem basically occurs when I'm rapidly selecting messages to read, immediately after hitting the Send button.
Please look in the config editor at the following hidden preferences.
For the send to be occurring in the background as you say they should be; This hides the sending dialog.
mailnews.show_send_progress false (Change this to true)
This sends the message in the background
mailnews.sendInBackground false (Change this to true)
This sets the number of messages in the outbox that prompts a send dialog when you exit or are in offline mode.
offline.send.unsent_messages 1
Those changes are to default values. If they are not set already they may not appear in the config editor. To change the values, right click to display the menu.
Modified by Wayne Mery
When I looked, it seemed that your suggestions would result in no change:
mailnews.show_send_progress was True, and shown as default (dim) mailnews.sendInBackground was False, shown as default (dim) offline.send_unsent_messages was 0
So, I reversed all three, i.e. False,True,1, AND NOW IT WORKS!
It has stopped hanging as before.
So, to reiterate, I set show_send_progress to FALSE, sendInBackground to TRUE, and offline.send.unsent_messages to 0.
I'm pleased with the result, even though it may have been something other than what we thought, like perhaps the window manager, for example.
Thanks so much for your support.
I was seeing similar issues - Thunderbird 60.5.0, macOS Mojave (10.14.2), iMac. So far, so good with the changes. Thanks!!
However, I've since noticed once or twice that my drafts don't always get deleted (GMAIL account). Might not have anything to do with this though...
This is being handled in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1381485