514289 - Cannot display contents of an email folder, cannot compact or reindex folder (Thunderbird hangs)

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Mark Shafarman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (20090812)

This has happened 3 times in the past two months. I try to move one or more messages from my Inbox to one of my local folders. I get a message saying something like "Cannot write to folder, compact folder". I try to compact the folder, but Thunderbird hands. I close Thunderbird and try o view the folder, but nothing is displayed. I try to reindex the folder. Thunderbird hangs again.  I cannot display the mail in the folder, nor can I compact or reindex folder (Thunderbird hangs. When looking at the disk, I find that the size of the damaged folder is around 4 gigabytes, so I rename it (name_xx)and its indexd folder, and then I rename it's most recent backup and the index for the backup (to a different name, e.g. name_yy. I delete the offending folder and its index, and restore the backup folder and its index, and everything works in Thunderbird, except that I have lost the emails that I tried to move into the folder the first time.

I've not been able to get this problem to repeat, and haven't seen it reported before, but would be happy to get any assistance with it, since it's a bummer to have to get email resent to me, and once my damaged mail folder had been copied to its backup and I lost several months of mail that was in that folder.

Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce




see above.... if it happens again, I'll try and zip the offending folder and email it to you...

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

> When looking at the disk, I find that the size of the damaged folder is around 4 gigabytes, (snip)
> I delete the offending folder and its index, (snip)

What was exact file size? 2GB<=size<4GB? 4GB-1? just 4GB? 4GB<size?
(4G = 2** 32 = 4294967296)
Do you have back up of the file around 4GB?
Do you remember file size before problem happened?
(e.g. 2GB yesterday, but around 4GB today, even though total size of newly downloaded mail is not so large.)

> I rename it's most recent backup and the index for the backup (snip)

Backup is automatically taken by auto-back software while you are using Tb?

> Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce
> if it happens again, I'll try and zip the offending folder and email it to you...

Please never send or attach such a big file.
If it happens again, keep back up of profile directory(at least file of name_xx and name_xx.msf) first, then try recovery procedure such as compact, rebuild-index, restore of backup.
And, write about file information(size, timestamp, ...) in this bug, please.
If file size is exactly 4GB-1, it's probably Bug 494706.
If file size is greater than 4GB, it's probably Bug 387502.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mark, question for you in comment 1.

Comment 3

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to last question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.