204590 - message body shows wrong message, not in sync with summary window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 145638

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Calum Mackay]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030430
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030430

I'm using the 3-pane setup, Modern theme.

Occasionally, when a message is viewed, the contents of the mail shown are
wrong. What is shown is an old, previously viewed & deleted, message. The
summary window shows the new message details, but the contents (and associated
headers) relate to the old, deleted, message.

View-Source shows entirely the old, deleted message.

If mozilla is restarted, the problem disappears: the new message is shown in the
contents window.

I'm using IMAP for this account; the problem seems to always occur in folders
other than INBOX. The folders are having mail delivered to them (by procmail)
and are being checked for new messages by mozilla.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Read, and then delete, all messages in a mail folder. They appear simply
marked as deleted, since this is how I have mozilla setup.
2. Do a Compact Folders on this folder, to purge the deleted messages on the
IMAP server. The folder now appears empty.
3. When new mail arrives in this folder, courtesy of procmail, mozilla will
notice, since I have checking turned on for this folder.
4. Selecting the folder shows me the new messages in the summary window.
5. Occasionally, clicking on a message in the summary window shows an old, read
& deleted, message in the contents window, not the new message (you can easily
tell since the subject lines don't match)

Actual Results:  
mozilla shows an old, deleted message.

Expected Results:  
mozilla should show the new message.

I will attach a screen shot in a moment, illustrating the problem.

The IMAP server we're using is imapd-uow:

* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4REV1 LOGIN-REFERRALS STARTTLS AUTH=LOGIN] clem
IMAP4rev1 2001.314 at Tue, 6 May 2003 13:02:31 +0100 (BST)

Whilst this could be a problem on the IMAP mail server, I don't believe it is,
since:

o manually looking in the mail folder on the IMAP server shows the new message,
not the old

o restarting mozilla cures the problem

It's as though mozilla is caching the messages, and failing to refresh the cache
when the folder's messages are deleted.

The problem is occasional, and I have no way of reproducing it on demand. The
above steps are what I am doing when I see the problem, but it is far from 100%
reproducible.

I have found no other way of curing the problem, when it occurs, other than
restarting. Refreshing the folder list doesn't help, nor does switching to
another account and back, nor opening the folder in a new window.

I'd think I were going mad, if I didn't see it in front of me. The screenshot
will illustrate what's happened.

I'm marking this as major, since it has the potential for dataloss. It's easy to
delete the new message unread, since the contents you are seeing are old.

Comment 1

[Calum Mackay]

Attachment: screenshot of wrong message

This screenshot illustrates the problem. The message shown in the contents
window does not match that shown in the summary window.

The correct, new, message in the one appearing in the summary window (the mail
relating to bug 141983). The headers and body shown, in the mail relating to
bug 204364, are from an older, deleted message.

Looking at the mail file itself on the IMAP server, it contains the new mail,
the one relating to bug 141983.

Comment 2

[Calum Mackay]

I'm tentatively adding "dataloss", since it does cause this, at least for me. It
is easy to delete an important message by mistake, if you're not seeing the
right contents. This could also be viewed as data corruption (onscreen, at least).

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

this is a dup, and is a combination of a problem with your imap server (which
can be fixed by upgrading it) and a problem with mozilla handling the problem
with the imap server. Basically, the IMAP server is rolling uid validity, and
we're not handling that correctly - we need to be either flushing our memory
cache, or including the uid validity in our mem cache key. I'll try to find the
dup. I think it's a stretch to call this data loss, but it could lead to data
loss if you delete one message when you think you're deleting an other.

Comment 4

[Calum Mackay]

Thanks, I will push to get our server upgraded. Anyone have any details on what
uow imapd versions might suffer from this bug, and what versions don't?

I couldn't find much in the way of dups, other than Karen Huang's old bug 15260
"need test case for imap uid validity changing", which doesn't describe these
symptoms.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

it was bug 145638 - in that bug, it's claimed that UW 2001a, which unfortunately
is shipped with RedHat 8.0, has this problem, but it's fixed in UW 2002b

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 145638 ***