1677608 - Thunderbird metadata for folders appears to get corrupted

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Curt Blank]

Attachment: TBird MS wrong 2.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Sent a message.

Actual results:

Recipient of message shown in Sent folder wrong

Expected results:

Recipient should be correct.

Protocol is IMAP. Messages are always left on server so only metadata, From, Subject, To is cached on MacBook Pro macOS Catalina 10.15.7, TBird 78.4.3.

This has been happening for a long in in the Drafts folder, Recipient getting messed up i.e. wrong, so much so I do not rely on the Drafts folder any more. Now it is happening in the Sent folder

Look at the two attached images. In each image 3 emails are shown.

In the "TBird MS wrong 2" image the first email with the Subject "Re: All Metal Hotend Retraction" was sent to "Micro Swiss" as shown in the bottom TBird pane, the upper summary pane shows it was sent to Aideepen at Amazon.

In the "TBird TM wrong 2" image the third email with the Subject "Creality X Carriages" was sent to "Tiny Machines" as shown in the bottom TBird pane, the upper summary pane shows it was sent to Micro Swiss.

If I move the messages from the Sent folder to another folder then move them back to the sent folder TBird then shows the Recipient correctly.

I cannot reproduce this, when it happens it happens, I have no rhyme or reason why.

Comment 1

[Curt Blank]

Attachment: This is the second image mentoned in bug report.

This is the second image mentioned in the bug report, I could not attach both when submitting the bug report.

Comment 2

[Curt Blank]

Attachment: TBird Corruption #3 s.png

This is a continuing severe problem, this one just happened 15 minutes ago...

Comment 3

[Curt Blank]

This time moving the message to another folder did not correct the incorrect recipient shown in the upper pane message summary.

Comment 4

[Curt Blank]

Just sent another email, in the Sent folder the Recipient shown is again wrong in the upper summary pane. It appears to be duplicating the Recipient of the previous sent message that is in the Sent folder instead of showing the true recipient of the newly sent email.

Steps I've taken to try to alleviate this.

1. Moved 2/3 of the message out of the Sent folder to Archive folders
2. Exited Thunderbird after doing #1
3. Restarted Thunderbird and did a Compact on the Sent folder.
4. Exited Thunderbird then restarted it
5. Problem continues no matter what is done

More steps Ive tried.

1. Move all messages out of the Sent folder to a an empty temporary folder. 261 messages, what you call conversations were in the Sent folder.
2. Exited Thunderbird
3. Logged in to the email server. Looked at the Sent folder. Even though it is supposed to be empty (except for the MAILER-DAEMON header message) it had 4 message in it.
4. Started up Thunderbird compacted the Sent folder then exited Thunderbird.
5. On the email server the Sent folder still had the 4 messages in it.
6. Copied the sent folder to preserve it.
7. Did a "head -13 Sent.20201117-SupposedToBeEmpty > Sent" to modify the Sent folder to only have the MAILER-DAEMON header message in it.
8. Started Thunderbird, moved the Sent messages from the temp folder back to the Sent folder.
9. Sent a message while viewing the Sent folder. Message was added to the Sent folder again showing the Recipient from the previous last sent message in the Sent folder and not the true Recipient.
10. Sent another message. Message was added to the Sent folder again showing the Recipient from the previous 2nd last sent message in the Sent folder and not the true Recipient. But. And this is where it gets even weirder, now the previous last sent message shows the correct true recipient.

So if you followed that, hope it's not too confusing, the last sent message shows the wrong recipient but the message previous to the last that also had showed the wrong recipient now shows the correct true recipient. So only the last message in the Sent folder shows the wrong recipient in Thunderbird's upper summary pane.

Even more steps tried.

1. Again moved all the message out of the Sent folder to a temporary folder.
2. Exited Thunderbird.
3. Check the Sent folder on the email server, this time it only had the MAILER-DAEMON header message in it.
4. Moved the Sent.msf file to a different directory with a different name.
5. Started Thunderbird. Check that it created a new Sent.msf file. It did.
6. Moved all but the last message in the temp folder (because it showed the wrong recipient) back to the Sent folder.
7. While in the Sent folder sent a test message. It was placed into the Sent folder and showed the correct recipient.
8. Moved the last message from the temp folder that showed the wrong recipient back to the Sent folder. It continued to show the wrong recipient.
9. While in the Sent folder sent a test message. It was placed into the Sent folder and showed the wrong Recipient, the wrong Recipient that the message moved in #7 showed and now the message moved in #7 showed the correct true recipient.

Even way more steps tried.

1. Again moved all the message out of the Sent folder to a temporary folder.
2. Exited Thunderbird.
3. Check the Sent folder on the email server, this time it only had the MAILER-DAEMON header message in it.
4. Moved the Sent.msf file to a different directory with a different name.
5. Started Thunderbird. Check that it created a new Sent.msf file. It did.
6. Moved all but the last 5 test message in the temp folder (because the last showed the wrong recipient) back to the Sent folder.
7. Sent a test message to a friend, it showed the correct Recipient but only because the previous message was to that same friend.
8. Discovered that by then sending a email to myself and that one showed my friend. not me as the Recipient.

I give up. Nothing I can do eliminates the problem.

Comment 5

[Curt Blank]

I have tried versions 78.4.2, 78.4.1, and 78.4.0, so along with 78.4.3 they all exhibit the same problem/behavior.

Comment 6

[Anje]

If you have created a Thunderbird help Support Forum question, please post the link to continue conversation.

In the meantime:
Menu app icon > Preferences
select 'General'
Scroll all the way down to 'Network & Disk Space' section
Under 'Disk Space'
Your cache is currently using X of disk space -
click on 'Clear Now' button

Exit Thunderbird
delete the Sent.msf file and the 'Drafts.msf' file
Start Thunderbird

Comment 7

[Curt Blank]

Did what you suggested and more. In the directory:

~<username>/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/kp569p40.default/ImapMail

For my email account there were what appeared to be duplicates for the account

For my email server which is mail.<mydomain>,com their was:

drwxr-xr-x mail.<mydomain>.com
drwx------ mail.<mydomain>.com.sbd

and

drwxr-xr-x mail.<mydomain>-1.com
drwx------ mail.<mydomain>-1.com.sbd

So I deleted all 4 complete directory structures and files.

I then started Thunderbird and it created:

drwxr-xr-x 73 <username> staff 2336 Nov 18 12:55 mail.<mydomain>-1.com
drwx------ 3 <username> staff 96 Nov 18 12:53 mail.<mydomain>-1.com.sbd

Why were there duplicates and now why is the "-1" added?

I then checked the Sent folder summary pane and the last message sent now showed the correct true Recipient. It did not before the above steps.

I then sent myself an email and when that email was placed in the Sent folder in the Sent summary pane it did not show me as the Recipient is showed the Recipient of the previous last message in the Sent folder as the Recipient of the message I just sent to myself.

So the problem persists.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

@Curt,
Does this still reproduce when using version 91? And if you resolved the problem, what was the solution?

Comment 9

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard