1618007 - Unable to delete email until after restart

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Daniel Kauffman]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.106 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

After using Thunderbird for some time (I'm not sure of the interval between occurrences of the issue) I am no longer able to delete email. In list view, I have tried using the Delete key, the Edit menu option to Delete, and the right-click menu option to Delete. In message view, I have tried using the Delete key and the Edit menu option to Delete. None of these five methods delete the email. I am able to confirm that the message persists (and the issue remains) after quitting and restarting Thunderbird normally. I've also observed that if an email is marked as "Unread" the above methods will mark the email as "Read". This suggests that the "Delete" event is being triggered correctly, it just isn't being handled correctly. After I observe the issue, I am able to resolve using the following steps: First, I restart using the Help menu option to Restart with Addons Disabled. Then, during the restart, when prompted with a dialog about safe mode, instead of continuing in safe mode, I do not change any of the options, and simply click Quit. I then restart (with my addons enabled) and I'm able to delete normally again using any of the five methods described above. After some time, the issue recurs.

Actual results:

After some time passes, delete fails. After the restart sequence described above, delete again succeeds. Repeat.

Expected results:

I should be able to delete using any of the five methods described above, without having to restart.

I'm wondering if, over time, the profile becomes corrupted in some way, and restarting in safe mode refreshes some part of the profile.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Check tools > error console for information that looks relevant just after attempting a delete that fails anbd post your results

Comment 2

[Daniel Kauffman]

I was able to check Tools > Developer Tools > Error Console. With all of the filters enabled, to show as many messages as possible, there are no messages anywhere near the time (either before, during, or after) that the delete fails. Just to keep things interesting!

However, I've also noticed another symptom that appears to be secondary to the delete failure: After the delete fails, if I click on another message in the same folder, the message preview pane does not update. Once I click on a different folder, and then back to the first folder, I'm again able to click on any message, and the message preview pane updates as expected, and I'm able to click one message after another without issues. As soon as I attempt to delete again, this symptom recurs.

One additional detail: Both issues occur with regular folders and with saved search folders, so the issue doesn't appear to be specific to the type of folder.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Have you tried repairing the folder?