196303 - After upgrading to 1.2.1, attachment icon not shown in the message pane or header pane, addresses disappearing, and blank windows when opening a message in a new window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 106461

(MailNews Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Matt Claridge]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; RedHat Linux 7.1) Gecko/20010110 Netscape6/6.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

After upgrading to Mozilla 1.2.1 from either Netscape 6.2 or Mozilla 1.0,
everything works fine for a couple of days and then these symptoms appear
simultaneously: attachments are no longer visible either as paperclips in the
header pane, or at all in the message pane; address books and especially address
lists disappear (although the files themselves are still there and readable and
prefs.js still points to them); when you double click on a message to open it in
a new window, the resulting window is completely blank, even though the message
was perfectly readable in the original message pane.

The problem is DEFINITELY related to the preference files although I can't pin
down which one - but two profiles on the same PC will not necessarily both show
these symptoms. Upgrading to Mozilla 1.3 does NOT fix the problem. Deleting the
contents of the profile directory and recreating the preferences from scratch
fixes the problem TEMPORARILY, but the symptoms come back within a few days. It
appears that maybe Mozilla is doing something to the prefs that is corrupting
them possibly? It is possible to 'fix' (or remove) the problems by downgrading
to Netscape 7 or Netscape 6.2, so it appears to affect only the 1.2 and 1.3
branch of Mozilla.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Take a Windows 98 PC running Netscape 6.2 or Mozilla 1.0.x (I can't test with
any other versions)
2. Do a standard installation of Mozilla 1.2.1, letting it convert and use the
existing profile
3. Check that Mozilla starts and works ok, which it should.

Actual Results:  
Within a few days (might be longer if it doesn't process as much email as ours
do) the first symptom you'll notice is that all evidence of attachments
disappears. Check for the other symptoms and they will be apparent also.

Expected Results:  
It should have just carried on working...

- We use the default theme
- Mozilla profiles are, and have always been, stored on a network share
(permanently mapped to the client PCs)
- We use a read-only user.js file to fix certain prefs (but we have tried
removing this to get around the problem, as described above)
- Previous upgrades from Netscape 6 to mid-branch releases of Mozilla have gone
without a hitch

Comment 1

[Matt Claridge]

*** Bug 196302 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

Reporter, have you tried removing (or renaming) the XUL.mfl file in your
profile-directory ? It will automatically recreated.

Comment 3

[Oliver Klee]

Matt, Mozilla 1.2.1 is quite old. Do you see the bug on a recent nightly build
as well?

Comment 4

[Matt Claridge]

Haven't tried deleting that single file. Just tried it now though and it had no
effect. I have tried deleting the whole profile directory before now and letting
it recreate from scratch...

I agree 1.2.1 is quite old, but this is a large organisation and we wouldn't
normally even consider using a beta release - we only looked at 1.3 because
Mozilla betas (and even alphas) have always been very stable. We can't use
nightly builds for two reasons - too little guarantee that they won't be stable
and the amount of time taken to build, test and roll it out to users - we're
quite heavily understaffed...If we could pinpoint the cause of this behaviour
and know that a recent build would fix it we could then invest the time, but
otherwise we'd be fighting a losing battle so to speak.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Reporter:
Can you close Mozilla and RENAME the file "abook.mab" in your Mozilla User
Profile   
 to something like "abook.bak" ?
(That's your Mozilla Addressbook)

Comment 6

[Matt Claridge]

This should have been in my report I'm sorry. Renaming abook.mab does resolve
the issues, but it does it confirm that Mozilla is doing something funny with
the address book file. As with deleting the whole profile directory, the problem
reappears in a few days, plus of course, the user loses their address book (its
a shame that Mozilla can't read its own .mab files! - then we could import the
data into a new address book...). It can't be the address book at the heart of
the problem because versions of Netscape read it quite happily...

Comment 7

[Matt Claridge]

Sorry, Netscape CANNOT read the address book, as i stated (wrongly) in my
previous comment. However, if we get the address book from a backup, then
Netscape reads that and carries on without any problems.

(I think I've said that restoring address books or prefs from backup does NOT
fix the problem under Mozilla - which is strange).

Comment 8

[Daniel Wang]

-> mailnews general for triaging

Comment 9

[Brent Harsh]

I just had this exact problem occur on Mozilla 1.3 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U;
Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312).

I've been running 1.3 alpha and upgrading pretty regularly before this, though
so I don't think it was a conversion issue.

To verify the problems were the same, I renamed the abook.mab (and also
abook.nab, maybe a holdover from NS 4.7 which was a very small file) as
suggested in comment #5.  My attachments are now visible again. 

Timeline:
Several days ago (on 4/16) I received an e-mail with an MS-word .doc attached
and I looked at it and was able to see it.  The attachment Icon was present in
the list of messages.  Today, I received an e-mail with 2 .pdf's attached and I
could tell from the size that they did in fact arrive; however, no paperclip
attachment icon was visible nor could I see the attachments anywhere.  I went
back to e-mail #1 which still had the paperclip visible, but now was unable to
view the .doc file (no attachment window appeared when message was selected).

I viewed the raw inbox with xemacs and could see mime types of data following
the body of both e-mails so I did the bug search and found this one.  After
trying the renaming, I restarted Mozilla: e-mail #1 still had the paperclip,
e-mail #2 still did NOT have the paperclip.  Selecting e-mail 1 showed the
attachment box this time; selecting e-mail 2 also showed the attachment box
*and* the paperclip icon appeared in the index panel as well.

Add one more vote for this bug.  If anyone would like to see the .mab file in
question, I still have it and will also be playing with it to see if I can
restore it without losing my attachments (obviously I'd like to see both my
address books AND the attachements on e-mail).

Comment 10

[Mikkel Lauritsen]

I'm seeing this as well - Mozilla 1.3 on Windows 98 SE. Attachments have
disappeared and the appearance of the mail header was changed, and deleting the
abook.mab file has made the attachments available again.

I don't know of any particular reason for the apparent corruption; it basically
just happened.

Should I attach my abook.mab to this bug?

Comment 11

[Barry de la Rosa]

Also getting this problem, using 1.3 release on Win98SE. Haven't tried the
address book hack yet but would like to retain addresses if possible!

Comment 12

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

damn, i missed comment #6

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 106461 ***