1841411 - Mail tabs not reliably restored after restart, other tabs like Settings also not reliably restored

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[betterbird.project+5]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.67

Steps to reproduce:

Open two messages in tabs. We're using POP3 and hence local folders.
Restart.

Actual results:

The mail tabs are re-opened, but they are empty.

Expected results:

The mail tabs should have been restored correctly.

The behaviour is somewhat random, it works fine on a small profile, it mostly fails on the second restart on a large profile with lots of activities at startup. Seems to be some timing issue.

We also found bug 1841410 looking at this issue, but that appears unrelated apart from the fact that it's a timing issue, too.

Comment 1

[betterbird.project+5]

Attachment: badly restored settings tab.png

Restoring tabs at startup in general isn't stable. At times, "Settings" or "Advanced Preferences" are restored empty or incorrectly. There are varying errors in the console:
Uncaught TypeError: document.getElementById(...) is null - loadPrefs chrome://global/content/aboutconfig/aboutconfig.js:459
Missing preference for ID calendar.alarms.playsound - preferencesBindings.js:118:21
Uncaught (in promise) ReferenceError: gAlarmsPane is not defined - init chrome://calendar/content/preferences/calendar-preferences.js:23

Comment 2

[betterbird.project+5]

More random failures:
Uncaught ReferenceError: gSearchResultsPane is not defined - preferences.js:138:3
This time the Settings tab was empty.

Comment 3

[betterbird.project+7]

We looked into this for a while, here's a band-aid fix that shows where the problem lies. Really this is the wrong solution, the tabs which aren't selected shouldn't be loaded at all until they are selected. See bug 1649035 for more problems in this area.
https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-patches/blob/main/115/bugs/1841411-restore-mail-tabs.patch

Comment 7

[Sahand Rahi]

I am not sure whether my bug is exactly the same as this. I have read a few related bugs and suspect the best course of action is to report my bug here. Let me know if I should be reporting this as a new bug or somewhere else.

I use Thunderbird 115.12.0 on Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS. I use unified folders.

When I open emails as tabs from my unified inbox, a problem occurs if any other folder than the unified inbox is selected when I close thunderbird again, which is that I lose all of my tabs upon the next restart.

I then have to go into session.json.backup and copy everything into session.json, especially, the following:

"{"rev":0,"windows":[{"type":"3pane","tabs":{"rev":0,"selectedIndex":0,"tabs":[{"mode":"mail3PaneTab","state":{"firstTab":true,"folderPaneVisible":true,"folderURI":"mailbox://nobody@smart%20mailboxes/Inbox","messagePaneVisible":true},"ext":{}}"

Then, the tabs reappear.

However, if I forget to do that, then session.json.backup is overwritten by the broken session.json and I lose my tabs for good.

Is there a way to fix this in an upcoming release?

Comment 8

[Todd]

I have the same situation as Sahand, except I am on Fedora 39 and thunderbird-115.12.1-1.fc39.x86_64. This bug drives me nuts.

I have found I can reliably reproduce (not on purpose) this bug by having Xfce's shutdown close Thunderbird when I forget to shut Thunderbird down manually before powering off for the night.