#268 Script-timeout causes mail to be sent unencrypted

[webmind]

Sometimes when sending an e-mail to a user I do not have a key of, after clicking the send button, thunderbird/enigmail doesn't respond. At this point I am expecting the keylist where I can select a key or download it from a keyserver. Instead after a while I get a popup telling me a script is unresponsive (it isn't clear that this is pgp or enigmail), when clicking 'stop script' the mail I wanted to sent signed&encrypted is send unencrypted without me getting an option to cancel the sending.

It's quite hard to reproduce as the time-out only happens sometimes at unpredictable times.

[Ludwig Hügelschäfer]

How many keys are in your keyring? Sometimes, when enigmail calls gnupg, it updates its trust database and this takes quite long (can be some ten seconds for a keyring like mine with about 2000 public keys). During this time Thunderbird/Enigmail seems to hang. If the enigmail operation is cancelled via the "unresponsive script" function, there is nothing we can do to prevent sending the message unencrypted. The only thing we could do is display that a GPG operation is active, see Bug 72.

[webmind]

About 300 keys. Considering that the 'unresponsive script' error says nothing that indicated that this is the gpg-process, users will have no idea what kind of script they are cancelling and what the consequences are. Accidentally sending a message unencrypted can have use consequences for a user, so they should at least be able to prevent this.

Is the problem with 'not being able to prevent sending it unencrypted' a problem within thunderbird? Because perhaps that should be addressed there then.

[Ludwig Hügelschäfer]

Well, the problem is that the "unresponsive script" function does not tell which script is "unresponsive", which is understandable, as in 99.9% of all cases the script name will not tell anything to the user.

The chain goes like this: Thunderbird fires Enigmail function (upon click on send button), Enigmail works and fires gnupg. gnupg takes long, and Thunderbird goes impatient and kills - upon user selection - the enigmail function, still waiting for gnupg. Then the function within Thunderbird ("send message") is continued, with unencrypted mail content.

There is NOTHING enigmail can do about this. There is no back channel to tell Thunderbird "Don't get impatient, we do something good, will just take a while".

[webmind]

but is it possible to prevent that the thunderbird "send message" function is getting executed? Like by having another function checking whether it was encrypted at all or that the previous script exited correctly?

Or that the thunderbird function "send message" is run by the script?

[Patrick Brunschwig]

See my last comment on bug 249 [bugs:#249]