1176212 - Saving multiple messages omits some messages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 711016

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Phill Luby]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150511103818

Steps to reproduce:

Selected three messages, one with the subject "Portable Power Pump Pressure Washer Car / Caravan / Motor Home Brush:Amazon.co.uk:DIY & Tools". Right click, choose "Save As" and type a folder name and click save.

Here's the message source of the affected email with email addresses and message id removed:
From - Fri Jun 19 13:00:58 2015
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:                                                                                 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.140.49.2 with HTTP; Wed, 26 Mar 2014 05:53:43 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.140.49.2 with HTTP; Wed, 26 Mar 2014 05:53:43 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 12:53:43 +0000
Delivered-To: ???????????????
Message-ID: <???????????????@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Portable Power Pump Pressure Washer Car / Caravan / Motor Home
 Brush:Amazon.co.uk:DIY & Tools
From: ???????????????
To: ???????????????
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a113a34166747e204f581f5d4

--001a113a34166747e204f581f5d4
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B005EXO0I6/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1395838308&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX110_SY165

Cheaper than that electric one, not sure about it though. What do you think?

--001a113a34166747e204f581f5d4
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B005EXO0I6/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1395838308&amp;sr=8-1&amp;pi=AC_SX110_SY165">http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B005EXO0I6/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1395838308&amp;sr=8-1&amp;pi=AC_SX110_SY165</a></p>

<p dir="ltr">Cheaper than that electric one, not sure about it though. What do you think?</p>

--001a113a34166747e204f581f5d4--


Actual results:

The folder was created but contained only two messages with the "Portable Power Pump Pressure Washer..." message missing.


Expected results:

All three messages should have been present.

Note: the "Portable Power Pump Pressure..." message saves individually as "Portable Power Pump Pressure Washer Car _ Caravan _ Motor Home Brush:Amazon.co.uk:DIY & Tools.eml" without problem.

I'm trying to save several hundred messages and over 50 are missing. It's not practical to determine which ones are missing. I've provided the example which I tracked down.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Phill, thanks for reporting and sorry for the inconvenience caused. This is a critical bug (of which there are many unfortunately, against a small team of volunteers to fix them...).

I'm looking at the subject of that missing message:
> Portable Power Pump Pressure Washer Car / Caravan / Motor Home Brush:Amazon.co.uk:DIY & Tools

So potential causes might be those special characters (colon, slashes, ampersand), or, more likely, the LENGTH of that subject, also depending on the length of the folder path where you're saving to.

- how long was your target folder path?
- are there any missing messages which have a short subject?
- if yes, do they have any other special characteristics like "special characters" in subject?

Imo this is likely to be a duplicate of 711016, a bad but relatively rare bug known since 2004 (bug 248561).

Comment 2

[Phill Luby]

I'm saving to /home/xxxxx/Documents/xxxxxxxxxxxx/1234/ on an ext4 file-system.

There are no messages saved with subjects of the same or greater length. However, saving the message individually into the same path works fine, but the name used is of different format to that used when saving multiple messages.

Other messages containing "/" have had it replaced with "_". Other messages contain "&" and ":" in the file-name without any problems. I guess we can rule these out.

I think you're probably right about this being a duplicate of 711016.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks. Let's continue in bug 711016.