103276 - Incorrect count of unread posts presented in the left pane...

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 101503

(MailNews Core :: Networking: NNTP, defect)

Description

[Marcin Kasperski]

While reading the news with mozilla I noticed inconsistency between the amount
of posts presented in the 'left' (folder) pane and in the newsgroup contents
pane. In fact, on the left side I see info about more posts than there are in
the newsgroup (it even happens that the tree pane signals a few new posts on the
newsgroup but after clicking it no one Unread post exists). Moreover, this wrong
info is never corrected.

I suspect, that the mismatch started to exist after I killed hanged mozilla
(which hanged due to attempt to read fifo as signature file).

There are in fact two things to be corrected:
- the problem with incorrect info (why are wrong numbers presented)
- the fact that this incorrect info is not updated when the newsgroup is clicked
and the exact information gathered and presented.

By the way: AFAIR similar problems sometimes happened in Netscape4

Comment 1

[[not reading bugmail]]

I believe the first # is total posts and while you are in the newsgroup, that
number is total # of unread headers you downloaded..

just needs to be clarified I think for more people, a tooltip or something
should be used here.. or a (total)(unread) implementation maybe.

Comment 2

[Marcin Kasperski]

1) If I understand correctly, mozilla shows in the 'tree' pane the names of all
the newsgroups, and only in case of the newsgroups which has some unread message
it prints the newsgroup name in bold and attaches the amount of unread messages
belonging to them in brackets. 

2) Take a look at the screenshot I attach (it presents some local news server
used in my organization, this is the old good INN 1.5.2). As you can easily see
there are three unread messages on the newsgroup but the tree pane presents some
magical (16). This is not the total amount of all the messages on the group -
this group contains currently a few hundreds messages.


One additional remark (maybe it matters): I set all my newsgroups to show only
'Unread' messages.

Comment 3

[Marcin Kasperski]

Attachment: Screenshot of strange number presented in the newsgroup summary panel

Comment 4

[Jason Johnston]

Take a look at bug 59681 or the other dependencies in tracking bug 71728.
Probably a dupe.

Comment 5

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Do you have any settings such as "Watched threads with unread" or "Ignored
Threads" set?

Comment 6

[Marcin Kasperski]

No. I use 'view/messages/unread'.

By the way: there is also problem with 'space' hotkey - after I click space on
the last visible message in the newsgroup which presents too large number in the
left pane, space stops working and does not do anything.

Comment 7

[R.K.Aa.]

dup of bug 103824?

Comment 8

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

It shouldn't have to come to this, but if you delete your .msf for the
newsgroup, and launch mail, does the problem go away or does it eventually come
back?

Comment 9

[Marcin Kasperski]

1) I doubt whether this is a duplicate of 103824. I have not observed 'seeing
the same post for the second time'. I just observe that the tree pane shows more
unread posts than there are on the newsgroup. The wrong behaviour starts after
mozilla crashes for some reason (not related to this bug or to news client at
all) - when I restart it I see wrong amount of posts on some newsgroups. After I
reported this bug for the first time I got the second crash with similar results.

I suspect that killing mozilla with news client being open, just after reading
some posts, can reproduce the bug.

2) I noticed that pressing Ctrl-Shift-C helps (when I am in the newsgroup with
incorrectly presented number and press Ctrl-Shift-C the number in tree pane is
reset to zero and since then the newsgroup is presented correctly).
3) I have not read mozilla code but I suspect that someone employs optimization
like 'add/substract the amount of new/read posts to some counter, save the
counter on disk on exit' and after the crash this number goes out of sync. Some
timestamp which would enable to check whether this number is in sync with the
list of read posts would probably help.
4) As currently I got synchronized view (using Ctrl-shift-c), I am unable to
check whether deleting msf file helps.

Comment 10

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

We have a 5 minute timer, which runs with the shutdown service to write out the
unread status counts to disk.  

Comment 11

[Marcin Kasperski]

To correct the problem, mozilla should check whether status-es on disk are
up-to-date. And in case they are not, just re-read everything. Some timestamp?
Some flag written on normal exit and not present after the crash? Sth. else?

Comment 12

[Phil Miller]

User Agent ID: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011011

I've just experienced this error as well, and I can be fairly sure that it has
nothing to do with closing/killing the browser with MailNews open. When browsing
a newsgroup, I clicked "Get Messages for Account" in the context menu for a
specific group, and the number shown changed to something insanely higher than
the actual number of unread posts, sometimes stayed that way, and other times,
after clicking on the group name again, went back to to proper count. Seems to
be an issue of displaying the total number of posts rather than the number unread.

Also, I recommend changing the OS tag of this to all, as I'm encountering this on
a Windows 98 system.

Comment 13

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 101503 ***

Comment 14

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Verified DUP.  Millinex, I think you might be seeing other bugs linked from bug 
71728, which is our mail count tracker bug.