Re: Balsa crashing on opening HTML emails

[Jack <ostroffjh sbcglobal net>]

On 2013.08.10 09:05, Peter Bloomfield wrote:
> On 08/09/2013 05:48:27 AM Fri, Carlos Franke wrote:
> > For a few weeks now, Balsa has been crashing on me when trying to  
> > open certain (but not all) HTML emails. I am using the gtk3 git  
> > branch*, and I have version 2.0.4 of the Arch Linux webkitgtk  
> > package installed (the error seems to be Webkit-related, see below):
> > https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/webkitgtk/
> > File list:  
> > https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/webkitgtk/files/
>
> I've seen that, and others have reported the same problem.  In my  
> case, it's always gone away with some WebKit package upgrade (I'm  
> currently using 2.0.4-1.fc19), but I've no idea whether it's a webkit  
> bug or a packaging issue.  Since we're on (at least roughly) the same  
> version, it looks like packaging, but that's a very uninformed  
> guess.  I've never found any error in Balsa's use of the webkit API,  
> though of course that proves very little!
>
> Does anyone else have any suggestions as to the cause of the problem?

In my experience, it was always due to a badly formed (i.e., invalid)  
HTML.  Try saving the HTML portion of the message and opening it with  
various browsers.  Unfortunately, the message was usually from some  
major entity (frequent flyer program, major retailer, ...) and they  
never responded to my complaints.   In the past, I just recompiled  
balsa, either switching between webkit and gtkhtml or changing the  
version.  I'm on Gentoo, and currently using webkit-gtk 1.8.3-r300 (I'm  
on the gtk3 branch, so I suppose that doesn't say anything about how  
the gtk2 version would do.)

In terms of which piece is actually at fault - it's hard to call it a  
bug if the HTML is invalid, but it's likely how webkit is dealing with  
the HTML.  At least you get a crash.  More often than not, when I had  
the problem, it went into some infinite loop and just hung.  I'd try to  
confirm whether the HTML is valid or not, and then report to arch - at  
least on their mailing list.  There may not be much they can do until a  
new version of webkit is available, as they upgrade pretty quickly.

Jack