1857352 - Supernova Unified Folders shows deferred Inboxes under Inbox - pop deferred inboxes should not appear.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[David Taber]

Attachment: 2023-10-05 15_36_55-Inbox - Fanmail - Mozilla Thunderbird.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0

Steps to reproduce:

Upraded from TB v114 with no change

Actual results:

Extra inboxes show up in Folder pane: specifically, GNUFanmail and Sludgefaced should not show, as they are accounts that actually load their email into the Fanmail inbox. See attached.

Expected results:

Those two new inboxes should not appear.

Comment 1

[David Taber]

Still present in v128.

Comment 2

[David Taber]

To add some detail:

• all mailboxes are POP-3
• there are 11 of them
• the first 8 are behaving properly when their Account-download is redirected to a different account (that is, the redirected mailbox disappears in the UI)
• the last three accounts are properly redirecting to their "master" mailboxes, but the UI still presents them in the Inbox list
• adding another mailbox/account with redirection in place replicates the appearance of inboxes that shouldn't be shown
• speculation: there is some code in the UI that stops after the 8th mailbox

For fun, i've deleted/re-added mailboxes, redirected them to different "masters" -- everything behaves as it should except the "smart folder" presentation

Comment 3

[David Taber]

Pushed "save" too soon...

• There is additional "should not be there" email box UI detritus, in the Trash section
• The first 8 accounts are properly represented: "master" mailboxes get a trashbin, redirected ones do not.
• The subsequent 3 accounts, which are all redirected, show up in the Trash list. Like all other trash bins, they cannot be deleted.
• Those subsequent 3 accounts do, in fact, have Trash files in the appropriate directories...and some of those files are quite large (I don't empty trash often)
• The good news is that messages deleted from the redirected mailboxes show up in the appropriate "master" trash folder: all the redirected accounts' trash stays empty

Comment 4

[David Taber]

Another artifact of this bug:

• I have the extra accounts "pointing to" the Fanmail folder, along with some accounts that are behaving properly (and not showing on the list)
• If I click FIle>Get New Messages>Fanmail, TB downloads most of the Fanmail-relevant extra accounts
• But not the extra accounts (the ones that do erroneously show up in the Smart Inbox list)

Comment 5

[David Taber]

In the interests of science, I created an entirely new profile for testing this issue, running v128.3 on a separate windows 10 machine.
I set up just 4 new accounts, then pointed 2 of them to the other 2. Restarted Tbird.
All I should have seen in the unified folders view was the 2 "master" inboxes, but in fact all four appeared.
So my conjecture that the issue was somehow related to "more than 8 email accounts" is false.
Since I have a test configuration that can't do any damage to my real system, I'm happy to provide whatever diagnostic info would be helpful to troubleshooting...

Comment 6

[David Taber]

Attachment: inbox.msf

perhaps the issue relates to this file:
<profile>/mail/smart mailboxes/inbox.msf?
Here are the contents of the one I've got:

Comment 7

[David Taber]

I was able to resolve this by deleting all my child accounts (the ones that feed a parent account mailbox) and reinstating them.
Now all the children are properly invisible.
Guess this one can be closed.

Comment 8

[David Taber]

Actually....turns out that the problem persists. thought it was gone.
I replicated the symptom with a brand new Windows 10 pro PC I installed Tbird 128.6 64 bit.
I then created two accounts, each of which worked
Then I pointed one of the accounts to the other, and restarted Tbird. Both email boxes behaved as expected,
BUT the "slave" account should have disappeared from the Unified Folders list, as it contains nothing.
It's still there...
This bug first appeared a year ago, and it's a regression.

Comment 9

[David Taber]

Note I have followed all the procedures in this thread, to no avail.

A surprising amount of chatter about unified folder issues here.

Comment 10

[David Taber]

Discovered something odd. Have a test email account that's been created/removed several times, trying to troubleshoot this issue.
When I remove that account, there's nothing relevant to it in virtualfolders.dat.
But when I add that account back in, five identical URIs referring to the account are created in virtualfolders.dat...and five label files are created in the smartfolders/tags.sbd folder.
Where is T'bird storing the information it uses to recreate that stuff?? It isn't in the Windows registry...

Comment 11

[David Taber]

Following up on prior comment #10: it appears that that behavior was from a disabled (and no longer compatible) plugin called Manually Sort Folders. When I removed that (inactive) extension, that particular symptom went away.

AND THEN THERE'S THE WORK-AROUND for this bug

• create an account
• make it store its messages in another account
• if the should-be-invisible account appears on the Inbox list for some reason...
• kill T-bird
• manually edit the virtualforders.dat file, removing the reference to the should-be-invisible account in the mailbox://nobody@smart%20mailboxes/Inbox URI area, the "scope" line

What causes the malformed .dat file -- who knows.