131688 - Loss of local mail folders.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[paul.gammans]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020315
BuildID:    Mozilla 0.9.9

Local Mail folder become deleted. This leaves the folder.msf file intact but the
file containg the mail becomes zero in length or is deleted.

I haven't experianced this till 0.9.9 till then i was using 0.9.8+ (not use the
exact build it but around 2002-01-28) i try to get the ecact id.

Reproducible: Sometimes
I'm not sure how to reproduce this, but I'll add more comment to this bug report
when i out more info.

My investigation so far have lead me to think it has somthing to do with viewing
the folder while quitting mozilla. It might also have somthing to do with sub
folders.

I'm using the Debian build 0.9.9 of mozilla with enigmail, mozgest and
spellcheck installed.

Sorry about the vagueness of this report as i said i try to add more info.

Comment 1

[paul.gammans]

Ok i can now reproduce this reliably on some mail folder but not others by ..

1 load mozilla login
2 select folder*
3 quit
4 load mozilla
   Automaic prompt for login
   My Imap Mail Account has gained the selected folder in it's list
5 login using prompt
   When the login finnished the folders vanish from the imap list and
   from the on disk store ie Files now missing

To prevent data loss you can not login, quit, remove the folders '.msf'
file then restart. At this point the folder is nolonger visiable in the
IMAP's folder list

*So far the only folder this has worked on have had sub folders.

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

do you have your imap directory and your local mail directory pointing to the
same directory? That would explain this, and is not supposed to be allowed,
though that bug is not fixed yet.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

If that turns out to be the problem, I think I'm going to have to change the
name of the offline store to mailboxName.off and upgrade everyone's offline store.

Comment 4

[paul.gammans]

IMAP server Directory is .. /user/dtpg/dtpgprg/Inbox/
Local Folder Directory is .. /user/dtpg/dtpgprg/Mail   (a simlinked to )
/user/dtpg/dtpgprg/Messages

So i think the answer is no.

What i do get though is the stored .msf file for my IMAP'd folders in
/user/dtpg/dtpgprg/Messages not /user/dtpg/dtpgprg/Inbox/ i'm not sure
if this is supposed to happen though.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

No, it's not, and that's your problem. Effectively, they are the same directory.
Did you set up the symlink yourself? I didn't mean the IMAP server directory,
but rather, the local directory where we store your .msf files can't be the same
directory as the local directory for your local mail.

Comment 6

[paul.gammans]

I don't quit understand. I'm not sure how I set the directory IMAP's uses
to store the .msf files?

But yes i did set up the simlink myself, and now i will remove this and check
if this fixes the problem.

BTW. I did a bit of checking the data loss still didn't happen in 0.9.8 but
started happing before 2002022021-trunk. Though i do rember occasional less 
pridictable data loss before 0.9.8 so i change.

Thank for you quick response though, very much appreciated

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

Let me try again - it gets a bit confusing because you're running an imap server
on your machine so there are really three directories all on the same machine.
To be clear, I'm not talking at all about the directory the IMAP server is
using, only the local directories Mozilla is using.

1. There's a directory where we store local folders and their associated .msf
files - in your case, /user/dtpg/dtpgprg/Mail.
2. There's a directory where we store the .msf files for your online imap
folders, as well as the offline copies of messages in those online folders (for
offline users) - in your case /user/dtpg/dtpgprg/Messages, which is sym-linked
to /user/dtpg/dtpg/Mail.

For offline users, we create a local offline store that's the same as the online
mail folder, in your local imap directory. So you'll have two files, say,
FolderA.msf, and FolderA. Now, when you startup, we check the list of folders on
the server, and what it looks like to us is that you've got a bunch of offline
stores for online folders that no longer exist, so we delete the offline stores.
Because the local mail directory and the local imap directory are the same, we
get confused. That's why I said before that I might end up having to make the
offline store be called something like FolderA.off to avoid this confusion.

Comment 8

[Michael Buckland]

Discussed at Mail News bug meeting with Engineering, QA Mktng and PjM.  Decided
to minus this bug.

Comment 9

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Is this problem still valid in recent Trunk/Branch builds? From the discussion, it does not appear to be.

If not, I will resolve INCO in 3 weeks.

Comment 10

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESO INCO per previous comment.