108698 - Local store of messages frequently gets deleted

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[Bill Sheppard]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011011
BuildID:    2001101117

I'm using IMAP, and have Mozilla set to download all messages.  Quite frequently
upon launching MailNews will choose to redownload all messages (presumably due
to rebuilding the .msf file, but I'm speculating here).  It often happens after
Mozilla has crashed, but at times it happens with no obvious cause (i.e. Mozilla
and Windows had been shut down uneventfully prior to the launch exhibiting this
behavior).  I have seen it in Netscape dating back to 4.x.

I consider this rather serious, as one can't rely on the local store of messages
being intact consistently, a problem if you'll be offline or
bandwidth-challenged for any period of time where you'll be needing access to
the mail.  In effect this means offline mode is broken.

Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
Other than a crash I don't know how to force this behavior.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

what IMAP server are you using? My guess is that your server is rolling imap uid
validity (basically, telling us that all our uids are invalid, and we have to
throw away all information we've cached locally), which forces us to start from
scratch, and there's not much we can do about. If that's the case, this bug is
unfortunately, invalid.

Comment 2

[Bill Sheppard]

How can I determine what mailserver is in use?  

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

generate a protocol log and look at the header sent by the server.  The UW
server sends back a very distinctive greeting that doesn't usually mention UW
but gives a very large version number.

http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html#imap

Or just telnet to port 119 on the server and see the greeting sent back.

Comment 4

[scottputterman]

Bill, can you provide this information?

Comment 5

[Bill Sheppard]

The log shows "Solstice (tm) Internet Mail Server (tm) 2.0p12 IMAP4 service".

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

I'm pretty sure this is the imap server rolling uid validity, and we're required
by the imap4 rfc in that situation to throw away all locally cached information.