Preview pane does not refresh after previewing a very large message

[Vide]

Step to reproduce:
1) receive a very large (> 210k) plain text message (no attachements, just text in the body)
2) click on it and get it shown in the preview pane
3) select another message (same folder, another folder, doesn't matter) and see that the preview pane always shows the very large message previewed in 2)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: evolution 3.2.0-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Nov 9 11:46:16 2011
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evolution
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-10 (29 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Stefano Bagnatica (thepisu)]

I confirm this bug, but also while scrolling the "large text email" the preview pane get broken

You can see the effect in the screenshot attached. In the bottom statusbar you can see also the message "Formatting message" that stay working for long time.

And, after taking this screenshot (I waited some minutes) I tried to scroll again the email, and Evolution crashed.

[Olivier Comas (olivier-comas)]

This bug is still present under Ubuntu 12.04 and Evolution 3.2.3...

[Paul Natsuo Kishimoto (khaeru)]

I tagged with 'preview-pane' seven Evolution bugs besides this one that all have to do with the preview pane ceasing to work. Are these duplicates, or distinct issues?

[Blue (vali-dragnuta)]

I have this issue too.
I doubt it's gfx driver related as this:
- only happens to evolution
- only happens to the preview pane (but not when opening the same message in a new window with double click)
- there are no driver related errors in the system logs; And the system works just fine after this error occurs.
- HOWEVER, when the error happens, the .xsession-errors log file gets flooded with errors like :

(evolution:6261): Gdk-WARNING **: Native children wider or taller than 65535 pixels are not supported

[Blue (vali-dragnuta)]

This bugreport, for another application also seems to share a common cause and also manifests when an application has to display a large object.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnucash/+bug/769015

[Blue (vali-dragnuta)]

Update:
On another bugreport for the same issue, someone recommended this workaround :
LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 exec evolution
This will disable the new fancy scrollbars for evolution, but will also make it immune to the above bug.
One can make a wrapper script to launch evolution with this environment variable.

Someone should check this bug out, it's clear that either evolution or some toolkit components (gtk/gdk) has an issue with those new scrollbars.

[Steve Graham (gram-steve)]

This is happening for me as well. On three different devices (all 12.04). Only happens on long messages.

These messages typically have been group discussions with multiple replies. The norm here is showing previous emails in the thread with "<" on each line of the previous thread. I got to thinking about this and the response I found from an Evolution developer saying this is related to gtkHTML.

I configured evolution (edit->preferences->mail preferences->html messages) to use Plain text mode by selecting the option to "Show suppressed HTML parts as attachments" and HTML Mode as "Only ever show plain text". Now I can't replicate the problem. HTML portions of inbound email are now attachments, which I can choose to view inline (handy because get a fair amount of email that is only html).

I think gtkHTML is getting blown away by what it thinks is an enormous amount of html open tags and no closing ones. But that is just a hunch, I did not try to verify it.

[Jesse Gilles (jesse-gilles)]

I know this is an old bug, but it still affects 12.04 LTS and I just ran into it. The LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 workaround does work.