enigmail slows down thunderbird 60 if S/MIME certificates are available

[Hermann Höhne]

Hi

After the update to thunderbird 60.2.1, I experience a rather unpleasant delay when composing a message. The delay is about 30 seconds and happens upon changing a recipient adress (one delay per keystroke and consequently suggested address) or replying (where the recipient address is automatically set). Sometimes, thunderbird is aware of the delay and asks whether to stop

chrome://enigmail/content/enigmailMsgComposeOverlay.js:2869

at which isSmimeEncryptionPossible() is defined. Unfortunately, I did not manage to track down which part of this function is responsible for the delay as all standard methods of logging (console.log(), dump(), Application.console.log()) or debugging (debugger statement) seem to fail and I do not have more in-depth knowledge of debugging extensions in thunderbird.

As a workaround, I disable enigmail for non-encrypted mails or mails encrypted with S/MIME, but whenever I want to use PGP, I am forced to wait through the delay.

Any suggestions on how to explore and/or solve this issue?

Kind Regards

[Olav Seyfarth]

I used to use TB 60.2.1 and am on 60.3.0 now. I have multiple S/MIME certs and many PGP keys. I never experienced this. I know this is unpleasant but to my experience, the only way to make sure it's not a corrupt config is to create a new user profile, import one cert and one key, create one or two accounts, install EM and reproduce the issue there. Platform info and an EM Log would be very helpful also.

[Patrick Brunschwig]

It's true that the function isSmimeEncryptionPossible() is called frequently. However, there is a timer that ensures that the function is called with a certain delay, and all key stroked typed between the delay are ignored. If that doesn't work for you, then I suspect that either another add-on is interfering with this, or you should maybe restart Thunderbird.

[Hermann Höhne]

Thanks for your replies.

@olav:
I am using thunderbird since 2006 and use the very same profile ever since. It contains gigabytes of archived mail and hundreds of contacts in the address book. It took me a while to export and import all that data into a new profile. This way, I was able to reproduce the issue. As soon as I import my certificates (this includes old certificates), the delay is back.
During the delay, I noticed thunderbird producing high I/O. It reads as much as my mechanical disk drive can give. It seems a bid odd as I would expect the keystores to be searched, which is not much data to be hauled around. If I move my Thunderbird profile to a SSD, the delay is significantly shorter, but still noticable.
I am on Ubuntu 18.04 "bionic", 64bit, kept up-to-date. Enigmail log is attached.

@patrick:
Apart from enigmail and lightning, I have no other extensions installed. Thunderbird is restarted daily (I am one of those people who actually switch off their computers).

[Hermann Höhne]

Also, after importing messages, adress book and certificates, the compose window changes in style (I presume Enigmail automatically leaves the "Junior Mode" – whatever that is, I did not read up on it yet).

[Olav Seyfarth]

Interesting, as it seems to relate to the amount of data. To verify this, please create a more or less empty profile, just enough to do the test (no imports of mails, just one UID and the keys and certs you need to test it. (That was what I meant anyway, sorry you had loads to do.)

Aside, I also had old profiles and during the last 4 years, I had to re-create them from scratch multiple times since TB did "weird things", especially after migrating to other PCs/OSes. VERY unpleasant if you have MANY accounts / keys/certs / settings / signature as I have.

As soon as Patrick's able to look into it, he will give feedback. He's very busy though. May I suggest to remove (only) the OLD certs from your profile for the time being as a workaround?

[Hermann Höhne]

Thank you for the reply.

I did as you proposed and noticed two things:
1. The delay seems to increase linearly with the number of installed personal certificates (irrelevant if expired or not).
2. Thunderbird's very own certificate manager is affected, too. Listing the certificates or deleting a certificate leads to an unresponsive dialogue. It makes no difference if enigmail is enabled or not.

The second aspect makes me come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with TB 60's way of handling certificates. Enigmail itself is probably fine, it just makes the problem visible (as available ways of encryption are searched every time the list of recipients changes). I headed over to the TB forums: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1241411

On a side note: My profile survived the transition from TB 1.5 to 2.0 and every version ever since, as well as moving from Windows XP to SuSE Linux, back to Windows 7 and then to Ubuntu Linux (I actually found some ancient paths starting with C:\ in the prefs.js). Other than for testing purposes, I am not giving up on it, yet. ;)

[Olav Seyfarth]

👍

[Olivier Bourgeois]

Same problem !
when i reply to, i need to wait a lot before the program give me back the hand. And this problem is more important if i reply to all and if there is many users in To: or Cc:
This was not suportable and i had desactivated the enigmail plugin.
(i have around 20 email accounts, fo some account 15 identities, using SMIME and PgP)
I see that when i click on reply, the windows open and at the left-bottom there is a message with a picto that appear with something like "Verify PgP ..." and until this message desapear not possible to use the windows (Program not responding) and this can take up to 10 seconds ...
Not usable...