1246853 - Thunderbird Identities/Aliases disappear from prefs

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[bugzilla-inbox]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.103 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1 - Having about 70 - 80 email address aliases under two accounts
2 - Use (write/reply) to alias email addresses


Actual results:

- alias email addresses disappear and need to be entered again
- upon reply to an email received to an alias address, where the alias has disappeared the default address for the account appears instead of the alias address


Expected results:

alias email addresses should stay and not needing reentering to stay functional

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

what exactly do you mean by alias?  Do you mean a contact's nickname in the addressbook?
Or do you mean in account identity?

Comment 2

[bugzilla-inbox]

There is a file prefs.js which contains entries like that:

user_pref("mail.identity.id1.useremail", "[e-mail]");

When I add an alias, it is added to this file. 
I am observing this file since yesterday and have not observed a loss yet.
I grep with userema on prefs.js and compare the result from previous grep.

The aliases which have been functional (receive/send emails) disappear and need to be reentered.
This is happening consistently for for quite a while across several THB upgrades.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

How  many identities do you have under each account?

Comment 4

[bugzilla-inbox]

40 and 32 email addressed, increasing

- added one, then diff, no loss at this one

Not sure what could be causing it - I run this Remove Duplicates plugin or whatever it is called. 
Just checked it, before/after - run 7 - inconclusive

As it looks it's data loss without warning/error message...

Comment 5

[:aceman]

The Remove Duplicates addon should only remove messages, not identities.
When a "mail.identity.idX.useremail" pref is lost, is X reused again for a new identity when you add one? Or is always a new unique number generated?

Comment 6

[bugzilla-inbox]

I started following and dealing with this issue a couple of days ago after I got fed up having to add again and again removed but existing and working alias.

Since observing it, I have not yet seen a missing case when comparing the "mail.identity.idX.useremail" occurrences before and after running THB. I am on iteration 11 right now and keep doing it until it shows up and then maybe get some idea about the context when it could happen. 

Once I have a missing case, I'll post it here.

I cannot say anything about the frequency since I notice it only when I answer an email with an identity. 

My subjective impression is that the entities which go missing are "older" i. e. not used for a longer time.

Comment 7

[bugzilla-inbox]

Update on this:

I encountered another missing identity alias but it got missing before my closer observation, here are the data:

179 emails received
41 emails sent under this alias-identity
last email sent under this alias-identity:  Dec. 14, 2015, discovered missing: Feb. 11, 2016