1693121 - New message folder colour change reverts

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[John]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:85.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/85.0

Steps to reproduce:

I am using Thunderbird Portable Edition 78.7.1 on PortableApps platform 17.1.1. I have a lot (about 50) folders, many of which are populated by filters which are enabled to run automatically.
When a new message arrives the colour of its folder name changes from black to blue (also, in the past, an asterisk was added) and the new message in the folder is indicated by an asterisk. Unfortunately, a problem has arisen in the last couple of months. Before the folder is opened, sometimes the colour changes back from blue to black, implying that there are no new messages in that folder; invariably, when I open the folder, the new message inside no longer shows an asterisk. This behaviour seems to be at random, or at least I have not been able to discern any pattern.
This indication of a new message disappearing before I open a folder is obviously inconvenient at the least. I can no longer risk messages arriving automatically, and so have unticked 'Check for new messages every _ minutes' and 'Automatically download new messages'. I have got into a routine in the past 2 months. When I click Get Messages, I sit with a pen and paper and scribble down the names of the folders shown as having new messages. Then I can, leisurely, open them and see the new messages or guess which ones are new if the message asterisk has disappeared. An example of this illustrates my frustration. One day last week, clicking Get Messages downloaded 24 new messages in 18 folders; I left them alone. Within about 5 minutes, the blue colour of 13 of those folders had reverted to black. If I hadn't noted which folders had new messages, I would have had no way of knowing they contained new messages. After looking at all these folders, I found 22 of the 24 messages; I have no idea where the other 2 are, and can only hope that they were not important. This situation is not what I would expect from 'the leading open source, cross-platform email ... client'.
This was not an issue until a few months ago. Thunderbird had been fine, and highly recommendable, in all the years (about 14) that I've used it, until recently. Now, for me, unfortunately, it is not reliable.
I asked for help on the Thunderbird Support Forum (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1315352#answer-1389803) on 25 November 2020, with a follow up on 5 February, but have not received any response.
I would be very grateful for any help in overcoming this problem.

Actual results:

As described above.

Expected results:

As described above.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does it reproduce when using a non-portable version?
Have you asked in a portable forum?

Comment 2

[John]

I only have it set up on the portable version. Sorry.
I reported it to PortableApps on 4/12/20 and 5/2/21. The response, on 5/2/21, was 'It's not really something we can assist with. We neither code nor support Thunderbird itself. I make it portable with custom code and support the portable-ness of it.'

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

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

Comment 4

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard