251109 - folder inaccesibility after disappearance and reappearance

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[ttt555]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707 Firefox/0.8

I had a folder named 'read' in the local folders, to which I was draggin old
imap emails. It dissapeared (don't know how). After I tried creating it again, I
got prompted that such folder exist.  The folder appeared after that. 
The problem is that when I click on the folder the cursor changes to 'busy' the
folder briefly loses the icon and repaints it (about half a second), and the
status bar says 'opening folder'. And it keeps saying that each time I shut down
firefox, restart and click on that folder. No emails are eign displayed during
the process.
After compacting the folder, the problem, together with my emails, dissapeared. 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[ttt555]

The saga continues. After the compating and everything, now I can see the folder
content as having 0 emails. When I try to drag and drop an email from my imap
inbox to it, I'm reciving a message that writing to the folder failed and that I
should free some disk space (2.4GB free on that drive). Restarting doesn't help.

Comment 2

[ttt555]

I cannot even delete the folder.

Comment 3

[ttt555]

Somewhat fixed, 

It appears that two things are occuring, the first one is that during the
upgrade (or whatever that reinstalation does for the latest thunderbird), mail
is stored in completly separate folder (but I might be wrong on this one). The
actuall file for the folder did not get copied. That's why the mail is gone. As
for the 'unable to write to folder' thunderbird creates a folder with the
filename in the same folder. Once that folder is deleted, everything appears to
be valid. 

I'd appreciate someone giving me feedback on is this a bug, or something else.
Thanks.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Emiljian: I'm not at all sure what happened to your folder.  This part is 
particularly confusing:

(In reply to comment #3)
> during the
> upgrade (or whatever that reinstalation does for the latest thunderbird), mail
> is stored in completly separate folder (but I might be wrong on this one). The
> actuall file for the folder did not get copied. That's why the mail is gone.

POP3 and LocalFolders mail is normally stored in a directory under your profile:
  <path-to-profile>\Mail\<account>

The files in this directory are primarily the mbox files and the index (msf) 
files:  Inbox and Inbox.msf    Sent and Sent.msf    etc.
One possible reason for the files not appearing is if the index file is 
corrupted.  You can delete the .msf file and it will be recreated on startup.

When you uninstall the program, the profiles are left untouched, and after 
starting a new installation, the profiles should be found and used.  Your mail 
files from the previous version of TB should still be there when the new version 
starts, unless you do something specific to delete profile information.


> As for the 'unable to write to folder' thunderbird creates a folder with the
> filename in the same folder. Once that folder is deleted, everything appears
> to be valid. 

What filename are you talking about?  Yes, if a file other than the expected 
.MSF and .DAT files is found in the profile, a new folder will be created with 
its name.  What do you mean "everything appears to be valid" after deleting that 
folder?

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

No response from reporter; =>WFM