208578 - Cannot recreate deleted folder

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 248564

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[Peter Kirk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529

I deleted some folders earlier today after moving their contents to other
folders with the same names. Now I have changed my mind and want to move the
other folders back to the location where the deleted folders were. But this
fails, silently. When I try to recreate the folders using File - New - Folder, I
get a message "A folder with that name already exists. Please enter another
name." But there is no such folder in the folder tree.

Looking with Windows Explorer at the actual directory structure, I find that my
old folders are actually still there, complete with their .msf files and
modified dates from earlier today. But I thought I had deleted them. I don't
think this always happens. But it certainly can i.e. undeleted folders remain.
So this is perhaps a side-effect of bug 204457. But it is a side-effect which
makes that bug serious: the leftover undeleted folders are not just a waste of
space but are blocking other functionality.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Delete a subfolder
2. Try to move into the same parent folder a folder of the same name as the
deleted subfolder
3. Try to create a folder of the same name as the deleted subfolder

Actual Results:  
After 2: Absolutely nothing! A bit of disk activity but no move.
After 3: Message "A folder with that name already exists. Please enter another
name."

Expected Results:  
After 2: Moved the folder.
After 3: Created the new folder.

Taking the hint from bug 204457, I compacted the folders. This has saved me a
lot of disk space, but it hasn't fixed the problem - the old folders remain in
the directory.

Comment 1

[Peter Kirk]

Another twist to this one: On reopening Mozilla next morning, the folders I
thought I had deleted had reappeared. Not quite a duplicate of bug 176998 or bug
204457 as I had compacted folders first.

Possibly bug 190023 is a less well documented duplicate of this one?

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

are these local folders? I've heard other reports of local folder delete not
really working...

Comment 3

[Peter Kirk]

Yes, these are local folders. They don't always reappear the first time I reopen
Mozilla, it seems to happen the second or third time. The problem could be that
there was some sort of failure to delete completely the first time, as some
other odd things were happening at the time. But the folders disappeared from my
mail window but had not actually been deleted. I have seen that happen quite a
lot of times. Sometimes the issue seems to be that the name of the folder
becomes different from the name actually on the disk, because of renames which
haven't worked properly etc. I have had to do a lot of renaming of folders
simply so that I can delete them or move them without running into other bugs.

Comment 4

[wintogreen]

I was able to reproduce a very similar problem, described at length in the forum
thread below. In my post I color-coded the various folder/file names to make it
easier to read, so please refer to the thread.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=669878#669878

Comment 5

[Christian Franke]

[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.1) Gecko/20040707]

Could not reproduce the problem by moving a folder, but by creating a new local
folder with the same name:

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Add a new subfolder, e.g. "Test"
2. Delete this subfolder
3. Try to create a new folder with the same name

Actual Results:
4. Nothing (visible) happens after the first press of the OK button in the "Add
Folder" dialog.
5. Pressing OK a second time, an error message "A folder with that name exists.
Please enter a different name." appears.
6. After "Cancel"ing (after first or second "OK") the "Add Folder" dialog, the
folder appears in the tree.
7. Selecting this folder results in an infinite hourglass (but no hang). The
folder cannot be used.

Expected Results:
Recreating a folder should work.

Looking under the hood, there are 3 issues:

After step 2, the original path of the "Test.msf" File is still in panacea.dat.
After step 4, a directory(!) named "Test" has been added to the mail directory.
In step 7, Mozilla tries to open the directory "Test" as a file.

Workaround: Delete panacea.dat from profile after step 2. After step 4, delete
also the invalid directory.

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

duping against 248564, which has a fix in it.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 248564 ***