1423588 - Thunderbird redownloads all imap email if it can't connect immediately

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1422568

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Matt]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171128222554

Steps to reproduce:

Existing work thunderbird installation, imap, multiple folders subscribed and set to Offline Use, many folders with thousands or tens of thousands of emails (although volume shouldn't matter), change password on server, start Thunderbird, it asks for password: succeed or fail on password it redownloads all email in all folders apparently.

This bug report over here explains it well:

" I think I've solved the problem though, which appears to arise from a bug in Thunderbird which nobody seems to want to acknowledge or resolve. On start up, it tries to access subscribed folders from the server, but if it doesn't make an immediate connection, it decides that the user has unsubscribed from that particular folder and deletes it. Then when the internet connection catches up and it can find the folder online and realises that it is subscribed, it re-creates it (reverting to default sort order and column settings) and re-downloads all the thousands of messages that it just deleted in order to synchronise."

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1910746


Actual results:

After the password prompt, thunderbird proceeded to redownload all email, message headers and then messages,  even though I have had this setup for along time (months) and by default I download everything for offline use.

This setup has been working successfully for years without this behaviour.


Expected results:

Thunderbird should not redownload all email in the case above. It should only download new messages.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Any objection to duping this to bug 1422568?