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

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(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.

Comment 9

[Todd]

Hi Guys,

I came up with a workaround to the O-B-N-O-X-I-O-U-S bug: wait four minutes for everything in the backup to quit after shutting down Thunderbird before shutting the computer down for the night.

Apparently, Thunderbird is doing some house keeping that gets clipped if you shut your computer down before Thunderbird fully terminates.

This should be a YUGE tip off as to how to correct the problem. Perhaps it would be as easy as popping up a splash screen telling the user some housekeeping is going on and to please wait for Thunderbird to terminate.

-T

Comment 11

[Hawley Rising]

I keep tabs open as a todo list, I had about 14 tabs open. I booted Thunderbird and the tabs were all blank with no content or header. I tried closing Thunderbird and booting again, and the tabs are lost.

Comment 12

[Todd]

(In reply to Hawley Rising from comment #11)

I keep tabs open as a todo list, I had about 14 tabs open. I booted Thunderbird and the tabs were all blank with no content or header. I tried closing Thunderbird and booting again, and the tabs are lost.

After shutting Thunderbird down, wait 1 minutes before shutting off your computer or restarting it or restarting Thunderbird. That fixed it for me.

Comment 13

[betterbird.project+18]

We filed the bug for version 115 where it is still easily reproducible. We can't reproduce it in 128, so please close the bug.