Mail: Doesn't work when there are too many messages in the table

These are probably two bugs in one depending on how you read it.

Today I had to delete a bunch of emails I created for testing something, and so I logged into Usermin and set the user Mail messages to display per page 1000 for the inbox so I could delete as many emails as I could at once.

Fine. Worked.

I then set it to 10,000

I could not access the inbox anymore. Every time I tried to access the inbox the loading circle that shows before loading the mail would stay like that for an extended period of time. I waited even 30 minutes between tests.

Of course. It's way too many messages at once, no problem I said, so I will just change it back to something lower. Then it hit me !!!! You cannot access that setting again now.

With the new Authentic theme, the user settings to change that configuration was moved to a gear right on top of the Mail tab.

You see the problem here? The user is now locked out of his messages for good.

Why? Because he cannot access the uconfig.cgi?mailbox page. Since the inbox will does not load anymore, he needs to change the setting first and reduce the amount of messages per page, but he can't because that setting was moved right on top of the page that Mail in Inbox.

In the past with was not a problem, because that setting page was right there in the user settings section in the sidebar but since this was moved now to the frame, the user is locked out for good.

I was able to fix this quickly because I said, I will just load the url manually, change the settings.

But you can't open that url unless you change /etc/usermin/config

referers_none=0

So I changed that first. Then manually loaded the url uconfig.cgi? to change the settings and fixed it but for my surprise, loading the page directly (without the frame) actually does work with 10,000 messsages. Now I'm loading the inbox directly without the sidebar and I tested it again and again and it works. It takes a while but all the 10,000 messages are shown and I can delete them. I guess this will also work even with a higher number.

So there are two nasty bugs here.

1. First, the Authentic theme loader has some sort of problem that will get stuck at XXX number of messages. It works with 1000, but eventually seems to be stuck at some higher number.

2. If this happens, there is no way for the user to change the settings back, mail users don't have root access so they cannot modify the referrers config file like I did.

Solution: 1. Loading the inbox directly works with any amount of messages but with the sidebar in place it does not. I suspect there is something wrong with the ajax loading that doesn't accept a particular size or timeouts as opposed to loading the page directly without that ajax load.

2. The user settings should not be there if you ask me. It should be somewhere in the side bar, because all those settings in the Gear Icon (uconfig.cgi) can potentially affect some settings that can stuck the user from loading the inbox again. Why is this in the inbox page in the first place???? It was in the sidebar before.

This is obviously a disaster if it happens to a user because he will then be locked out of his email messages for good (can't load the inbox anymore or access any messages) without any resort than contacting the administrator to fix this.