1874617 - redirected messages icon disappears from message list after running "repair folder"

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[:filigrana]

Attachment: Immagine.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:121.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/121.0

Steps to reproduce:

reproducible: always
To check the icons, I have an inbox containing 5 emails:
-1 redirected (orange double arrow)
-2 forwarded (blue right arrow)
-1 replied (purple left arrow)
-1 replied and forwarded (purple upper right arrow and blue lower left arrow) (why are the colors inverted? who knows?)
I run the "repair folders" on the affected inbox...

Actual results:

the redirected icon (orange double arrow) has disappeared...

Expected results:

the redirected icon (orange double arrow) should have remained in place...

In this regard, it is advisable to analyze the behavior of the aforementioned icons which seem unstable (they appear and disappear) during the normal operation of the program...

Comment 1

[:filigrana]

Is "repair folders" likely to do any more damage to the message database?

Comment 2

[:filigrana]

I add two further links to images from the test performed by the moderator of forum.mozillaitalia.org with the same version 115...

this is the message list before running the repair folder
https://i.postimg.cc/GtTY27Md/tes-tb-ante-riparazione.png

this is the message list after running the repair folder
https://i.postimg.cc/g0pfH1Rt/tes-tb-post-riparazione.png

we can observe that the redirected icon has disappeared and that the yellow icon of the new message has appeared...
this is further proof of the instability of the icons which (in this layout) are immediately to the left of the subject column...

Comment 3

[Ben Campbell]

Some thoughts on what I think might be happening here:

The IMAP protocol doesn't define a "Redirected" flag, so I think the flag is completely local to TB.
(you could test this by seeing if a message marked as "Redirected" still appears as redirected if you set up a fresh profile or TB installation and connect to the same IMAP account).

Since the IMAP version of "repair folder" works by essentially throwing away the msgDB and rebuilding it from the IMAP server, it's not too surprising the "Redirected" flag disappears.

The fix for this would be to make a note of all the messages flagged "Redirected" and re-apply during/after the repair.
This assumes the database is still valid, which it might not be if a repair is required!
The same issue likely applies to other per-message metadata tracked by the TB msgDB and not reflected in IMAP... can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't something else.

Obviously, a better solution would be to kill the "repair folder" operation entirely :-) In an ideal world it should never be needed.

Comment 4

[:filigrana]

I didn't say it before but I only have POP3 accounts...