1982366 - migration from seamonkey seems to create spurious mail folder

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Migration, defect)

Description

[democritus7]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0

Steps to reproduce:

I've been using Seamonkey email on 64-bit Debian 12 Linux until the past week or so, and decided I should try to convert to using Thunderbird as my email client finally. It was awkward trying to browse with FF and at the same time do email with SM. So I used the TB version in my Debian 12 distro, entered the information up to the point of running the migration code, and then the migration seemed to progress with no problems.

Actual results:

On completion, I found that I had two mail folders that appeared with the same name, my old primary folder democritus7 with the subfolders from SM mail, and a new one also displayed as democritus7 and having only Inbox, Drafts, Junk and Trash as subfolders. I opened a console and found that there were two profile folders under .thunderbird, One which had only one "default" in its name had only one file, times.json. The other had that, all the usual profile files, and a Mail folder with subfolders including inbound.att.net (the little new one) and pop.att.yahoo.com (the big one with all the old mail and referencing my popmail server). On checking my new mail, I find that the same new mail is going into both folders. I sent a few emails with TB, but I don't see a Sent box in the new mail folder, just the newly sent emails in the old Sent box.

Expected results:

I would expect that the migration code would create copies of the old folders in the new profile, maybe compacted, and set them up to be ready to use.

I would also expect that users should be cautioned about server settings and retention of msgs on the server so that msgs would not be lost during the days after conversion when a user might be expected to verify that everything is working ok. This of course would be for pop servers. I know nothing about IMAP servers.

On Mozilla Connect, I posted several other usability issues that arent exactly bugs but which make the Seamonkey mail client more desirable for many users. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/not-so-concerned-about-thunderbird-community-more-concerned/m-p/102945#M40014. In a followup, I pointed out that the addressbooks in SM mail were not at all migrated and will file a bug on that too if bugzilla doesn't list it.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mail folder with subfolders including inbound.att.net (the little new one) and pop.att.yahoo.com (the big one with all the old mail and referencing my popmail server).

So you are seeing something like this?
Mail
Local Folders
inbound.att.net
pop.att.yahoo.com

On checking my new mail, I find that the same new mail is going into both folders. I sent a few emails with TB, but I don't see a Sent box in the new mail folder, just the newly sent emails in the old Sent box.

Are pop.att.yahoo.com and inbound.att.net effectively the same account with different names?

Comment 2

[democritus7]

Hello, Wayne Mery, yes, those two servers are the same, just different names in my PC Mail folder in the Thunderbird user profile. I got them figured out today. There's a button I didn't notice before that allows deleting a server. I moved the unwanted mail folders under the Mail folder to a backup folder within the profile data, then deleted the unwanted server and it looks like I'm good to go. But that button to delete a server may not have been visible at the time I installed Thunderbird about 9 months ago. I am thinking at the moment about what steps can be taken to save a year's worth of mail (mainly Inbox but the Sent folder as needed too) to an archive renamed to a suitable yearly backup name. I usually use the filter with suitable date settings to do that. The Seamonkey folders were easy to select and move or delete based on selection, doing this with Thunderbird is at first glance more complicated and maybe tedious.

I loved Seamonkey, hated to switch.