1636145 - E-Mails vanish unrecoverably when archiving on yahoo

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Cedric]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Set up an IMAP account for yahoo.fr. in Thunderbird 68.7.0 The only modification to the so-created account was setting the content downloading limit to 1 day. Open a message, hit "Archive" in the header button bar to archive the message.

Actual results:

The presumably archived message disappeared and the next message was displayed. The archived message was later nowhere to be found. After the problem was later reognized, further attempts to archive (less important) messages were made, to see where they'd end up. After clicking "Archive" on several of them, they also vanished without a trace (all folders were synchronized/refreshed) but several minutes later showed up in the according archive "2020" folder. The preceeding message, however, never appeared there.

Expected results:

Messages should not vanish. Not temporarily and not permanently. I can only suspect there is a misdesign in Thunderbird which, upon "Archiving" (or possibly similar actions) purges the message from the remote and places it in a local queue, rather than performing the move via IMAP, and that queue was lost due to a local condition, so the message was never pushed to the remote folder. NB the account is populated with dozens-of-thousands of E-mails, which might affect the result.

On the other hand if the "Archive" operations were indeed atomic by a move via IMAP, than the temporary disappearance of e-mails (despite refresh) is a problem which might be related, I think.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

more yahoo funk?

Comment 2

[gene smith]

I started up tb, went to imap based yahoo account and archived a message. It worked fine. I then ran it with an imap log (https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging) to see exactly what happens:

imap.mail.yahoo.com:S-INBOX:SendData: 17 uid move 300816 "Archive/2019"
imap.mail.yahoo.com:S-INBOX:CreateNewLineFromSocket: * OK [COPYUID 1588973510 300816 1]
imap.mail.yahoo.com:S-INBOX:CreateNewLineFromSocket: * 276 EXPUNGE
imap.mail.yahoo.com:S-INBOX:CreateNewLineFromSocket: 17 OK UID MOVE completed

Yahoo supports the move command so the message is moved by the server to the archive mailbox. Since this a move and not a copy, yahoo "expunges" the message from the source mailbox (Inbox above) which means the message is gone from the server Inbox and should be present in the appropriate archive sub-folder. I don't see that tb is doing anything wrong in the above transaction. If reporter manday could record an IMAP:5 log while duplicating the problem, we may be able to see exactly what the problem is.
It may also be helpful to check in the "Activity Manager" of tb and see if there are any "move" events to archive sub-folders recorded when the problem occurs.
Also, it may be informative to look for the missing archived message using yahoo webmail.

Comment 3

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Because this bug's Severity is normal and has not been changed, and this bug's priority is -- (none,) indicating it has has not been previously triaged, the bug's Severity is being updated to -- (default, untriaged.)

Comment 4

[Cedric]

We can't reproduce this problem now. The archive operation also succeeds faster than before and without failure, maybe this has do to with TB completing some indexing on them? Given your explanation and that archiving amounts to an IMAP move, I think it's fair to close this as INVALID, unless you see any chance that some kind of a race condition due to the large amount of mails.