thunderbird crashes unexpectedly on opening certain emails

[Garbetjie]

Binary package hint: thunderbird

When opening certain emails, Thunderbird crashes unexpectedly. The action expected was to have the email open without crashing Thunderbird (TB), allowing me to view the email.

All the emails that this has happened in have not had any attachments, and it does not matter whether I click to open the email, or view it in the preview pane - as soon as TB tries to display the email, it crashes.

This does not happen in all emails, however. Additionally, if someone forwards a problematic email, I can read the email content of the person who forwarded it (assuming this email doesn't make TB crash initially), but only until the content of the problematic email is viewed, upon which TB crashes.

(Another issue, which could be linked to this: when trying to view a problematic email in a web-based email client, all the text is blanked out. I can select it, but all the characters are replaced with blank spaces).

I'm currently using Ubuntu 8.10, with all the latest updates applied, including the latest Thunderbird update (as of Friday, March 20). This is the current version of Thunderbird installed:

thunderbird:
  Installed: 2.0.0.21+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
  Candidate: 2.0.0.21+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
  Version table:
 *** 2.0.0.21+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1 0
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/main Packages
        500 http://za.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.0.0.17+nobinonly-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://za.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Packages

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Dependencies:

DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
Package: mozilla-thunderbird None [modified: /var/lib/dpkg/info/mozilla-thunderbird.list]
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/home/username/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_ZA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: thunderbird
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-11-generic i686

[rom1 (lavieestbelle)]

i got the same
i'm using thunderbird version 2.0.0.23 (20090817)
and ubuntu Version9.04
Kernel : Linux 2.6.28-15-generic (i686)
Desktop Environment : GNOME 2.26 (session name: this-is-deprecated)

i tried to open the same email on an other computer with a older version of thunderbird : ok, no problem

thanks if someone can explain the problem and solve
i'll try to uninstall/reinstall thunderbird

[rom1 (lavieestbelle)]

hi,

i fixed the bug in my case
actually it was a problem of fonts
i don't really know the details but i made some things and the problem disappear

i precise also that the problem was linked with a problem of unreadable text with some website in firefox

to fix the bug i have first uninstall "msttcorefonts" with synaptic
after i saved all the sub-directories and files of these directories : /home/me/.fonts and /usr/share/fonts
after saving i deleted the content of these directories ( the only sub-directory i didn't delete is /usr/share/fonts/X11)
i open a terminal and wrote : sudo fc-cache -fv
i reboot the system

and then it works : thunderbird didn't crash when i open my mail (and firefox show me all the texts that were blanked before)
then i create a new directory in /usr/share/fonts where i put all my saved fonts and again a sudo fc-cache -fv

then everything was coming good again
i hope it'll be useful for you
:-)

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner.
There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test the current Ubuntu development version (10.04). If you can test it, and it is still an issue, we would appreciate if you could upload updated logs by running apport-collect 345741, and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future.
To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New".
If you decide to reopen this bug, it would help us a lot if you could test the current Ubuntu development version (10.10) and check if this bug is still relevant.
Thanks again!