272995 - IMAP offline store getting corrupted when message load is interrupted.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Emmanuel Blot]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

This problem seems to show only w/ IMAP accounts

It occurs in all tested releases of TB (0.5 ... 1.0RC1), on different computers
(WinXP SP1 and SP2), with different IMAP accounts (from ISPs and company intranets)


Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
Let A and B two emails stored on the same IMAP account.
In the following description, it is assumed that all emails are stored in the
remote INBOX IMAP "folder" (not subfolder, no shared folder)

When a IMAP email (A) is being downloaded from the server - to be previewed in
the preview pane, AND that the user selects another email (B) before the
download of the previous email (A) is complete, TB get messed with the email
content (A)

When the user selects (B), (B) content is downloaded and displayed. Moving back
to the previous email (A), the email content is corrupted.

Actual Results:  
Depending on the case, (A) is either 
 * not shown (the content of the previously selected email is shown (B) or
another email whereas TB points to (A) email in the email list)
 * shown as an empty body (email body is blank, "source view" is empty as well)
 * text content is shown, attachements icons are shown, but attachments are empty

There is NO WAY to recover the email content. Even closing and restaring TB does
not force it to download the email contents. TB seems to 'think' that the email
content has been successfully downloaded.

The only workaround I know is to close TB, delete the IMAP cache (local file in
the user's profile), and start back TB. In such a case, TB downloads every
single email from the INBOX folder. If not interrupted by the user, the email
that was in error is successfully retrieved and displayed.


Expected Results:  
Display the full content of the email (text body + attachments) if already
downloaded from the IMAP server, OR
Download the remaining parts of the email, then display the contents

No theme, no extension

The bigger the email is (many and/or large attachment) and the slower the
connection is (between TB and the IMAP server), the easier the bug can be
reproduced.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

darn, I thought this was fixed in .9 or so...have you tried trunk thunderbird
builds?

Comment 2

[Emmanuel Blot]

No, up to now, I'm stucked with the 'official' builds (0.x.y and 1.0RC1)

I will try to remove every single file of a previous installation and test again
(I think I did it before to move to 0.8, but no since then).

I will also try a snapshot from the trunk.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

ah, one thing I should point out - the fix didn't fix old corrupt local stores;
it only tried to prevent them from getting corrupted going forward.

Comment 4

[Emmanuel Blot]

[local stores]: the bug shows up even if the local folder is initially empty. I
will double check, but I'm pretty sure I've reproduced the error with a clean
local folder

[trunk build test]: would you have any snapshot date to propose to test the
trunk build ? I tried the last two ones for Windows, and there are unfortunetly
broken (main window and icons are shows, but folders and messages aren't). Which
one should I try ?

[meaningless detail]: installer still show '0.6.0+' release for the latest
snapshot builds

Comment 5

[Emmanuel Blot]

Oops, I cleaned up the severity value

Comment 6

[Emmanuel Blot]

I can confirm I can still reproduce the issue w/ 1.0RC1, starting Thunderbird
with an empty local IMAP cache file.

Moreover, I've also encountered deadlocks whilst trying reproducing the issue:
the progress bar that indicates email content is being dowloading stalled at
about 75%, and clicking on any other email from the email list was ineffective:
the previous window stayed blank, and double-clicking an already-dowloaded email
did nothing.
I had to leave, then kill the Thunderbird process (w/ the task manager)

Comment 7

[Emmanuel Blot]

Attachment: Snapshot showing the typical TB screen

(nb od colors reduced to decrease PNG size; email addresses blured on purpose)

Comment 8

[Emmanuel Blot]

It seems that the bug is not exactly what I described.
i.e. the behaviour is the same, -but- it eventually works.

Once the message seems to be corrupted (content is empty), TB reports no
feedback to the user (such as the download message progress bar).

But, after a quite long period (about 3 minutes for a < 1MB message, whereas it
usually takes about 5 to 10 seconds to download such a message), TB ends up
downloading the message [I've only seen this case once, I need more time to
reproduce it if it can be reproduced], and showing it.
The weird part is that TB seems to be fully inactive (no feedback) whereas it
may download the message in the background ?

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

reporter is gone
WFM version 3.0a2pre (2008062703)

Comment 10

[Emmanuel Blot]

Actually, I don't use Thunderbird anymore.