Inbox Duplicates
Categories
(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)
Tracking
(Not tracked)
People
(Reporter: marty, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
Steps to reproduce:
Receive Pop3 Email
Actual results:
Nearly all messages in inbox list appear duplicated (approx 358,000 in all)
Deleting old messages followed by compacting inbox renders many messages unreadable, appearing to be empty.
Inbox and quick filter are very slow.
Expected results:
normal operation
Please update to TB 128.1.1, there was an issue with large mailboxes. You're using this on Windows with the 32bit version of TB?
Okay, did that.
Duplicates still exist, and still can't see emails that came in before the last compacting.
Yes, 32bit. Had 64bit but had to change due to incompatibility with another app that uses Mailto:
What to try next?
Thanks
Please upgrade to TB 128.1.1. Restore your mailbox from a backup. Hopefully the latest messages are still on the server and can be retrieved again. Unfortunately the compact operation truncated the mailnox to 4 GB and messages got lost.
Reopen the ticket if the issue persists.
I am on 128.1.1.
Please explain "restore your mailbox from a backup"?
With 128.1.1, no new dataloss should occur. If you repaired the mailbox, you will see all the data that survived the truncation of the original mailbox.
If data is missing, it's hopefully still on the server since by default, messages are left on the server for 14 days.
If you have a backup of your profile, you can restore that.
How can I instruct Thunderbird to re-download messages from the server?
Remove the popstate.dat file from the folder corresponding to the account. It records all the messages, TB has already downloaded. If you remove the file, everything on the server will be downloaded again.
Will deleting popstate.dat affect messages older than what's currently on the server?
Before doing that I rebuilt the folder index. I can now see messages that I couldn't before.
However, I lost all messages between Feb 2018 and Aug 13 2024.
Deleting popstare.dat will only cause a re-download, it doesn't affect already downloaded messages.
The lost messages are caused by the truncation of the inbox. Since POP eventually removes messages from the server, it's important to have a good backup. Using POP, sent messages are only stored locally, so a backup is required for those as well.
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Reporter | |
Comment 10•2 months ago
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Update:::
I updated to 128.1.1, did a compacting, rebuilt the index, and deleted Popstate.dat, and went to sleep, in that order.
Most of the older duplicates were gone, and I lost 5 years of messages. The new message download caused a bunch of new duplicates, which were easily dispatched. Aside from the gaping hole, things seems to be back to normal. The inbox count is down from 584,000 to under 50,000. The inbox and quick filter are much more responsive, though still not as fast to open messages as they were.
Thank you for the assistance!
It seems like when the truncating bug was found, an Alert Notice should have immediately been sent to all users. While the 128.1.1 correction did come out fairly quickly, not everyone installs every update, nor do they update immediately. This could have been a disaster for many users.
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Reporter | |
Comment 11•2 months ago
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Okay, so Meanwhile...
In a continuing effort to reduce the size of the profile, I deleted a big chunk of messages from my Sent folder and then did a compacting.
A few days later I needed to find a message I sent (one in a thread) to a vendor in July 2024 and found it from a quick-search. However opening it resulted in an empty message window.
I tried rebuilding the folder, and the messages disappeared from the quicksearch listing.
Curiously, clicking again on the term in the quick search window brings up a different results view (Timeline window?) where I could see them, complete with the first two lines of each message in the thread (the latest being July 2024), but opening it shows me a message from February and nothing after.
It seems that the 4GB truncation has affected more than the Inbox folder.
Description
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