Closed Bug 193916 Opened 22 years ago Closed 17 years ago

all mail sources (body etc) of mails in Inbox lost!!!

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Backend, defect)

Product:
SeaMonkey
Component:
MailNews: Backend
Platform:
x86
Windows XP
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
critical

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: mozilla, Assigned: Bienvenu)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030210
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030210

Mails in my Inbox only show up in the 'overview' pane (ie I see sender, subject,
date, etc), but nothing shows up in the 'reading' pane. 'View Source' for these
mails also doesn't display anything. Also clicking on a mail in the overview
pane doesn't change the active mail in the 'reading pane', it always stays on
the last mail I received. THis applies to all mails to a certain date, new mails
display fine. I've looked into the mbox file for the Inbox and also couldn't
find the mails, so I assume they are really lost. There were mails in the mbox
files that I actually deleted (and which don't show up in the overview pane),
which was at the time when I lost the other mails. Sorry I can't describe it
better, but this is a very serious bug imho. I must sadly stop using Mozilla as
a mail client :-( 

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
reporter can you give a better description as to what you did?
(ie, you installed build, went offline, click on mail mesg)

Were you offline when this ocurred (offline widget in lower right hand
corner disconnected?). Did you download mail before going offline?

Does it happen if you are online.

I assume using a imap mail acnt.

Opening a mesg in stand alone window does that work?



it's a bit hard to pin down when exactly it happened. I use a pop mail account,
and always read mail offline (although I have a permanent internet connection).
Usually I switch into 'View Unread' mode when checking for new mail, and then
delete all the spam mail before switching back to 'View All'. It's possible that
I was deleting mail while the download was still in progress (being in 'View
Unread' mode), as the connection was very slow today. Actually I think I
interrupted the download once because the connection was so slow, and connected
to the internet again with another connection. I might even have restarted
Mozilla in between for some reason. I also received the same bunch of mails
twice (or they weren't properly deleted), but I suspected problems on the side
of my email provider. On the other hand, I first had problems sending a mail.
I'm sorry I can't remember if I restarted Mozilla because of the sending or
because of the receiving problems.

Sorry, it was a bit messy, but the mails really seem to be lost. I suspect I can
still see them in the overview pane, because they still exist in the Inbox.msf
file. I can't see them in a standalone window either. I've also just reinstalled
Mozilla but that didn't help.

Sorry for another message in short time, but I've just copied the Inbox mbox
file to my Local Folders Account with a different name to see it's contents. It
contains only the mails that I had deleted (the same ones I mentioned as having
received them twice in my previous comment) before I noticed the loss of my
other mails. That is, they are one 'View Unread' set of received mails (one
session of receiving mail), 7 unread and one read. I deleted them all after
receiving them and reading one of them (all in 'View Unread' mode). So perhaps
the bug has something to do with the Views? 
I had exactly the same problem :-( I'm using:
	
Mozilla 1.4
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

All email bodies in my Inbox are lost :-( I can see the subjects, but if I open
a message, the bodies of all messages are empty :-( I can't tell you what I did
so that this happened.

This is a very, very serious bug! Are my email messages really lost now, or can
I still get them somehow?

I'm using pop.

Marc, you can look in the actual INBOX file and see if the messages are still 
there, with a text editor.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 (20030901)
OS: Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4

Using: 3 Pop3 Accounts

    I have more comments on this bug that may prove useful. Before deciding not
to keep old mail in the inbox and, on the other hand, moving it to the Local
Folders Inbox, I have experienced a similar problem:

    When I received e-mails, sometimes, my old ones dissapeared. I always kept
some unanswered messages there not only to have them as a reminder to answer
them, but also to keep them on the pop3 server and read them from elsewhere.
When this messages dissapeared, my recovery technique was to compact the inbox,
which inmediatly reappeared them. However, on some ocassions (and more often
than not) my recently downloaded -or currently downloading and being filtered-
emails, would become corrupted. Their headers would stay fine, but the contents
would either dissapear or become mixed (meaning that I opened a message from a
person I knew and while the overview pane was right, the contents where of
another of this corrupted emails). Also, when I opened one of these mails with
no content, the mail pane did not refresh from the last one, but only the
overview pane did (I think the overview pane is the one with the date, sender,
and subject...correct me if I am wrong).

    Some e-mails, magically survived to this corruption, and there was no
specific characteristic in them. They were just either unfiltered junk or
personal e-mail. Note that the filtering of junk mail, when this corruption
ocurred was usually stopped leaving most junk mail in the inbox.

    I recovered some of the lost mails by logging into the webmail for my
account or downloading them online from another account (such as Yahoo! Plus
mail). However, and because this corruptions started being more common, I opted
for keeping the old mails that needed to be answered in my Local Folder's Inbox.
I shall say that I am not happy with this choice, but at least I don't have to
compact the inbox folder, and thus corrupt more e-mails.

Reproducible: More often than not.

Procedure: tough to follow and obviously, I didn't tried it again, but I'll just
outline what I believe will make it reappear.

1 - Keep some old mails in the inbox (it always happened with my main account)
and wait until they dissapear to compact the folder, or just compact the folder
when new messages are arriving and getting filtered.
2 - If everything goes right (or, shall I say, definitely wrong), some e-mails
will become corrupted and no other method of correcting the fault would be found
other than to get the messages from the server using any other way.

Actual Results:
Mails are corrupted (and thus, lost) when compacting the inbox folder.

Expected results:
First of all, I shouldn't need to compact the inbox folder because the old
e-mails should never dissapear. Secondly, if I do compact the folder,
thunderbird (or the Mail/News Client in Mozilla) should wait until other
processes are finished before messing things up. Needless it is to say that no
corruption of the files or deletion of them is expected, under any circumstances.

Comments:
Thanks for making such a great mail client and browser that can fly past IE with
a bunch of people working on it, and a lot of users hapilly reporting bugs, and
being answered. Thanks.
In the last three months, I had two similar occurences. The last one today was on:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

As far as I remember, both happened during download of messages from a POP3
account immediately after starting Mozilla.

In both cases, there was heavy background activity, and at the same time most
incoming mails were moved out of the Inbox by rules (all mails received that do
not contain my first name in "To" are automatically moved to a lower priority
folder...), and I also tried to open some of the incoming mails. So it seems
similar to the "race condition" situations mentioned in other similar bugs, like
bug 176220 or bug 159876.

Some additional symptoms:

 - The mbox files kept a reasonable size, but some of the new incoming mails
were stored at the very beginning, and the rest of the files was filled with
zero bytes.

 - .msf files were left intact

 - Two mails that should normally have been moved by the rule actually stayed in
the inbox.

 - Both the inbox and the target folder of the rule were corrupted.
After experiencing this bug in previous version, only at work (never at home!),
I decided to do a complete (totally threw away everything) fresh install of TB
0.8 today. sadly it still happens.

I have two accounts: 1 IMAP and 1 POP3, with 'leave mail on server'. The latter
one still loses its Inbox every now and then, when TB has been open for a while.
The only 'background' action might be the spamfilter, because it happens when a
new mail/spam arrives, as far as I can tell. 

It might also be a 'compacting action', which seems unnecessary on this POP
folder(?), but I hav not
Product: Browser → Seamonkey
I have recently downloaded some mails including one with attachment over 1MB.
Unfortunately, I was also connected on very low bandwidth and receiving via POP3
failed several times (timeouts, had to restart Mozilla to force it download mail
again).
After mail was downloaded, there appeared some stubs from previous attempts -
incomplete e-mails etc. After I deleted some of them, strange empty e-mails
appeared with date 1.1.1970 (or so). I deleted whatever was necessary, but after
next compacting, my Inbx was suddenly empty. Inbox file shrunk to 2kB, so it is
probably empty too. Subfolders of Inbox held their content. 

SeaMonkey 1.0a
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; cs-CZ; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050910
SeaMonkey/1.0a. Build ID 2005091012.
SeaMonkey 1.0a on XP Pro SP2
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050910 SeaMonkey/1.0a

Experienced the same problem.  After a popup asked to confirm compacting of
folders, the inbox was blank (verified with editor), but the .msf still showed
the original messages that were in it.  This is disasterous to someone that
keeps their pending messages to reply to in the inbox - lost forever.

Haven't attempted to duplicate - needless to say I won't be compacting for a while.

> Experienced the same problem.  After a popup asked to confirm compacting of
> folders, the inbox was blank (verified with editor), but the .msf still showed
> the original messages that were in it.  This is disasterous to someone that
> keeps their pending messages to reply to in the inbox - lost forever.
>

That's extremely bad. Do you have Google Desktop Search or a virus checker
installed?
(In reply to comment #11)

No Google desktop search.  Freedom firewall has a virus check feature, but I'm
not even sure it was active at the time (it crashes at times and it's off right
now, but I'm not sure if it was on or off at the time).

Never had it happen before on Mozilla Suite - just with the 1.0a SeaMonkey I
just installed.  I have had strange clearing of the pane after a compact, but
switching to another folder and coming back usually recovers it (or a restart of
the app).

More strange happenings.  I now have an empty Inbox, but the unread message
count is at 90.  After leaving the Inbox with 1 message in it and going to
another folder, when I go back the 1 message now has 3 threaded followups that
are identical to the 1 message (all point to the same message).  If I try to
compact Inbox, nothing happens.  If I mark it read, the 90 goes away, but still
have a screwed up .msf.  This version needs some real work on message folder
handling.


Continuing on with the latest problem - if I go back to my single msg in the
Inbox.  I see 10 unread msgs listed in the left pane along with the + thread
indicator in front of the message (both of which are incorrect).

I click on the thread indicator and see 3 copies of the single msg each being
one level farther down in the thread.  Then I collapse the thread and it still
shows the levels of the thread even though it's collaapsed.  Then I open the
thread back up and I now have three levels under the first msg and two levels
under the first msg in level 2 for a total of 6 msgs.

I close it again but 5 are still showing and re-open and now have 8.  Then 7 and
9 then 9 and 12 and on and on.  This is downright ugly to look at in one of the
most critical areas of an email client.  Not to mention the fear of doing a
compress again.


you should remove your inbox.msf file and let seamonkey regenerate it. It sounds
like it no longer matches what's in your Inbox file.
(In reply to comment #15)
> you should remove your inbox.msf file and let seamonkey regenerate it. It sounds
> like it no longer matches what's in your Inbox file.

Wrong - I shouldn't have to do anything to make it work right.  ;)

PS: I've already done that on an earlier instance - I'm not looking for a
workaround - I'm trying to get someone enough info to fix it.

WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007090302 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre

also, reporter writes "I never ran into this one again. It kept happening after my original posting, but I have no experience from the last three years or so. "
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 17 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.