Constant crashes

[pwhit]

I've had great success with MailWasher Pro over many years of use, but a couple of days ago, it started crashing constantly. And by constantly, I mean I have less than 5 seconds usually after starting it to try something before it crashes.

There are two separate crashes. The first was happening somewhat randomly but frequently, e.g. after some number of minutes, maybe even an hour. It was an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." (null reference) exception. You can see the tail end of the MWPapi.log file here: https://pastebin.com/HhsucUmW

It seemed like there might be some damaged data so I tried removing the cache folder and reloading it all fresh. That seemed to work in that it was able to fetch the mail again, and then run the spam evaluation over it. However, about a minute later (when I have it checking for new mail on a timer or if I manually check for new mail), it now crashes with a "Value cannot be null." exception: https://pastebin.com/HD0NjL6F

So I cannot run MailWasher Pro anymore, and hardly even run it long enough to check something. Is there a way to keep my rules and settings (I have a setup resulting from years of use and tuning), but revert to a fresh set of data (is removing the cache doing that?).

Please advise on what I might try next to correct these crashes. I'm an experienced (30+ years) developer so there's an opportunity there for more info, but I'm hoping the two exception tracebacks above will just hand you the cause.

Thanks,
Paul

Windows 10, 64-bit, 16GB, lots of free disk space

[pracsol]

I have the same problem and have allowed error reporting to report my errors. No response from Firetrust.

[rusticdog]

Unfortunately MailWasher seems to be crashing on certain spam emails. You'll may notice these emails as they will load blank FROM fields in the list. We're looking at fix that now, in the interim all I can suggest is to clear those emails manually either via webmail or your regular email client.

Sorry about the hassles, will let you know as soon as I can.

If you are able to identify any of these emails and provide the Full Source, feel free to email that to me in a text file to [email protected]
The programmers have not told me they don't have enough info to sort out, but just in case.



Cheers
Chris

[pwhit]

Thanks @rusticdog, the suggestions were good ones and I'm not quite sure why I didn't think of that myself. I think I have been able to determine that there are two problematic spam messages at the end of my mailbox (the oldest two messages). Both display as blank in the MailWasher list. I am able to obtain the source for both, and I will send them to that email address along with a Mailwasher Pro screenshot image. The blank fields also seems consistent with the various null data exceptions; it's probably having trouble parsing the email and triggering an exception. Hopefully these two emails will provide a reproducible case for the devs. (And hopefully deleting them when I'm done will end my crashes.)

Thanks,
-Paul

[pwhit]

Quick update for readers: Using a webmail client to removing (from the server) the two spam emails at the end of my mailbox did not stop the crashes, so they were probably not the problem cases. I've sent some crash logs to Chris, as they do show the exceptions in good detail.

But even after removing those suspected emails and clearing the MWP cache folder, I was still unable to make the crashes stop, so I ended up getting desperate and using my webmail app to remove ALL my email messages from the server. At that point, my MWP crashes stopped.

So I'm back to normal / stable now with MWP, unless I get another such problematic message again. And if that happens, one workaround is to collect the email in another (non-web) email app, and use a webmail app to delete all mail from the server.

[pwhit]

My installation started crashing again, and I believe I've identified the issue now. I'm not going to identify it publicly since it can crash anyone's MailWasher Pro very simply, once you know the bug (so in that sense it is a vulnerability).

Instead, I've sent the source for an email which I think reproduces the problem to Chris / @rusticdog, as well as simple instructions on how to crash an MWP, and that should provide the devs a fix. Hopefully we'll see an update that corrects it soon; it's very easy to avoid in the code if it is indeed the problem I've identified.

[rusticdog]

Many thanks Paul

[Toasty]

I also have an open ticket for the same problem, but perhaps have a different take on the problem. When I "upgraded" to Win 10 I installed a new SSD which primarily contains the OS and my executables, with most of my data remaining on the old Win 8 drive. My problem with Mailwasher (Pro 7.11.0) seemed to coincide with the arrival of the Creators Edition, but it could also be coincidence. In any event, I soon constantly received the "Value cannot be null. Parameter name: key" error message as soon as my mail was loaded, followed by a crash.

After trying every fix I could think of over the last couple of weeks I finally ran the copy of Mailwasher (7.5) that remained on my old Win 8 drive, which promptly downloaded my mail and has since remained stable. I have not yet located my version 7.5 setup file, but I did try clean installs of Mailwasher 7.3 and 7.7 on my Win 10 drive (C:\), both of which crashed immediately, just as version 7.11 does. Thus my current solution is a shortcut on my Windows 10 desktop that links to my old MailwasherPro.exe (ver. 7.5) on D:\. I have a few things that I would like to try yet, but currently my problem may not be something in the 2,000+ emails that have accumulated since Mailwasher started crashing, but rather it may be running Mailwasher on the system drive. Very odd!

[rusticdog]

Thanks for your patience with this problem, a beta version with a fix can be downloaded here
http://cdn.firetrust.com/downloads/mail ... 072017.exe

There is no need to uninstall the older version first.

[reltek]

I know this post is so old, but I needed to post a reply to this, because I am experiencing the same issue on my system with my mailwasher.

I have done everything that was suggested on this thread and I still can't get my mailwasher to not put up this error message, "Value cannot be null. Parameter text."

Deleted all the emails sitting in our email servers for my account using webmail.
Uninstalled mailwasher and completely removed all the folders associated with mailwasher/firetrust. Then, reinstalled mailwasher.
I even downloaded and installed the quick fix exe on this thread by RU.

After all that, Mailwasher is still complaining; Value cannot be null. Parameter text.

I looked deeper into the error in my windows operating system and it says the error is related to "PresentationFramework."

I don't know what that means.

Can someone help me?
Thank you,

[gingbat]

Sorry to hear you are having problems there, can you first please open MWpro and click Help>>About, if not using version 7.15.33, install this from here:

https://www.firetrust.com/products/mail ... o/download

Restart MWPro and see if problems persist.

If they do, possibly this is a windows .net framework issue, (MWPro uses this for its display)....

First, run windows update to ensure your PC is fully up to date.

Restart if anything required.

If no better, please try running the repair tool here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/downloa ... x?id=30135

Restart afterwards.

Please let me know how you get on there.