1497433 - multiple IMAP Accounts - edited Drafts saved into wrong Account's Draft folder

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Martin Schimunek]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

i have a customer, 4 people with 5 IMAP Accounts, and on each machine thunderbird has all 5 accounts configured via IMAP. User A ist starting a new message, and saves it into the Draft Folder. then User B opens this message on his machine, resumes the message, and saves it again in Drafts...


Actual results:

the save message lands randomly on one of the 5 Draft folders, and not in the Draft Folder of User A who initially created the message, and also not in the Draft Folder of user B, who continued the message. Same Problem appears an all 4 Machines, the continued Draft Messages always land randomly in one of the 5 Accounts. (i have configured the Draft folders manually to all matching IMAP Folders in the Accounts-Configuration)


Expected results:

the saved draft should be copied either into the initial message-creator or the account which edited the message, but not randomly into one of the 5 Draft Folders

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

So the five accounts have different e-mail addresses? So you're saying a draft stored in the Drafts folder of - say - account1 with [e-mail] ends up in the Drafts folder of another account, account2 with [e-mail]?

If that's the case, the cause is most likely that the four machines are configured differently. Search for mail.account in the Config Editor (in advanced options). There is some intricate configuration of accounts, identities, servers etc. And creating the accounts on the four machines in different orders would have caused the issue.

Do the users get a warning that the identities don't match and another identity was used?

Altogether this is a support issue and we'd rather not spend our scarce developer time so that you can serve your (paying?) clients better.

Aceman, do you have further insights here?

Comment 2

[Martin Schimunek]

Hi, yes, they have 4 personalized addresses for each user, and one office account, and all of these accounts are configured at all of the 4 Machines, exachtly in the same way, because i installed them all on the same day.

there are no warnings, they just get the information that the Draft is saved in the "Drafts" Folder, and then they always have to search all 5 Draft folders, where the mail was stored.

i have explicitly defined each draft folder specifically for each user to its own imap-Draft folder, but this setting is ignored somehow. the only thing that works, is to define the same Users Draft folder for all of those 5 Accounts, what i did as a workaround - so all Draft Messages are now saved in his own Drafts Folder.

best regards,
Martin

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I think you should still inspect those mail.account* preferences. The warning would occur when the draft is edited again since the account key in the draft might not match the e-mail on the next machine. Say:

Machine 1:
info@... - account key 01
sales@... - account key 02

Machine 2:
info@... - account key 02
sales@... - account key 03

In TB 60 we try to match the e-mail address now instead of purely going by account key in the draft, and if there's no unique match we display a notification at the bottom of the message when opening it again. It's possible that something goes wrong there and the message is still saved to the Draft folder corresponding to the account key on the machine where the draft is saved.

So in the example above: If you open an sales@ message produced on machine 1 with account key 02, machine 2 may save that to info@'s Draft.

That could be tested by setting up only two accounts in a new profile an making sure that the two keys do or do not match.

Where from here? You want us to setup something similar and test it?

Comment 4

[Martin Schimunek]

ok, i will check the mail.account prefences, but i have no chance to do that until next week, i will reply then.

thank you very much for your help so far,
best regards,
martin

Comment 5

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

You might even want to set up the two-account configuration to narrow down the problem, I'm sure the behaviour is not random. Where is the customer's site (which town)?

Comment 6

[gene smith]

Not sure I understand the setup. Per machine and tb instance, are there 5 accounts like this (showing only Inbox and Drafts):

User1
  Inbox
  Drafts
User1
  Inbox
  Drafts
User3
  Inbox
  Drafts
User4
  Inbox
  Drafts
Office
  Inbox
  Drafts

And 4 computers with tb running are set up like this? All 4 users have complete access to all 5 accounts? Then when, for example, User3 writes an email the possible draft is saved to maybe one of the other Drafts folders, maybe User1's Drafts or even Office's Drafts?

The problem may be that when User3 started writing, a folder in User1 account was actually selected. This will cause User3's draft to go to User1's draft since tb saves the draft according to the setup of the currently selected account.

If this is not the problem, where Drafts folder is selected under each account setting (Copies and Folders) try using the "Other" setting for drafts and explicitly select the account's draft instead of using ""Drafts" for folder on <account name> setting".

You don't say but I assume there are no "shared" or "public" folders involved here. That might be another way for the 4 user to collaborate without giving each user full access to all of the other user's folders.

Comment 7

[:aceman]

In the saved draft message, see the source of it and watch the 'X-Identity-Key:' and 'X-Account-Key:' headers.
Even if you open this in Drafts folder of account 2, if the 'X-Account-Key:' contains account3, it will be stored per folder settings of account3, which may be a different Drafts folder.
That is what Jorg is saying, if you created the accounts on the machines in different orders, the accounts may have different identifiers.
While we tried to somehow find the correct account via the sender address (the 'Identity' and 'From'), it may not work if you do not have the accounts set up carefully.
Sharing these special folders from different machines with TB is not easy.

Comment 8

[Al]

Using TB on a single PC and 6 IMAP accounts. Draft messages are occasionally saved on the wrong account. Account folder settings are correct.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you also see this issue when using versoin 68?