1418520 - Lost emails when copying from Inbox to local folder

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Alpheus Madsen]

Attachment: Screenshot_Moment_Emails_Were_Lost_20171117_154127.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.89 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Yesterday, I downloaded all my emails from GMail with the intention of storing emails locally, and removing emails from my GMail account so I could have more room.  To do this, I created a local folder called "older_messages", selected all my emails from the beginning of time to two years ago, and selected "move to" the new folder.  I think I accidentally started the move process twice (because I wasn't sure if I started it with the first click), because when I checked "older_messages" as the process began, I noticed duplicate emails in the folder; however, the duplicates no longer seem to be there, now that the move process is complete.

This was clearly working at first, as I could see emails showing up in the new local folder.  After several hours, though, Thunderbird became unresponsive, so I closed it.  This morning I started Thunderbird again.

NOTE:  The version of Thunderbird I'm using is the default apt-get version used by Debian Version Buster (testing) as of November 16, 2017.  (Apparently it's 52.4.)


Actual results:

I found that all my emails from the beginning of time to about the middle of 2014 were copied correctly.  Emails from the middle of 2014 to the end of 2015 are missing; instead, there are a lot of emails that are completely blank, except for the date "11/16/2017 3:19 PM"  (which, incidentally, is when I left my computer to continue the copy process -- I left for a math colloquium, and came back several hours later).  (Actually, when I look more closely at the emails, the problem started at "11/16/2017 3:00 PM", and the emails gradually increase to 3:19pm.)

Not only are all these emails blank, but they are absent from my GMail account as well.  (I expected the emails to be removed from GMail when they were copied to my local folder, so this isn't a surprise.)  I have tried to dredge the bowels of the ".thunderbird" data directory (I use Debian Linux Buster) to find any trace of these emails, but could find nothing.


Expected results:

(1) Ideally, the emails should have been copied straight up.  I accidentally started the copy process twice, and it looked like I was getting duplicate emails for a while, but I was willing to live with the duplication.

(2) In the event that something went wrong, any emails that weren't copied should have remained in the Inbox, and thus on the GMail server.  Alternatively, perhaps backups of the emails should have been made before this operation began.

(3) I'd be *very* ecstatic if, hoping against hope, there's still a way to recover these emails.

(4) In retrospect, it would have been nice to have a little progress bar indicating how many emails were being copied, and how many have been copied.  Having said that, I don't think knowing the progress of the copying would have prevented this from happening...

Comment 1

[Alpheus Madsen]

I have just discovered that, of the expected results I listed, I at least get (3):  I have been able to find a copy of all my emails!  (The gory details involve using "ag", aka "The Silver Searcher", and "grep" -- for some reason, "ag" didn't find the alternate file in question -- and the fact that I know IMAP pretty much requires Google tags to be converted to folders, with tagged emails duplicated in said folders.)

It turns out that, for some reason, there's a folder labeled "[Gmail]" which has a folder called "All Mail".  All my emails are thankfully in this particular folder.  Wasteful, perhaps (but a necessary side effect of the IMAP standard, as I understand it), but it certainly saved my bacon in this case!

I still think this is a bug that needs to be addressed, though...

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

So you had picked a large number of emails to download?

Comment 3

[Alpheus Madsen]

Yes.  This is the first time I had logged into my GMail account in ten years using any sort of email reader, so I had thousands of emails to download (I decided that it was about time that I take steps to back up my emails).  I am unaware of any mechanisms in Thunderbird to limit the number of emails to be downloaded at any one time....