222487 - hangs when viewing local folder altered by external process

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Tom Metro]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030919 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030919 Firebird/0.7

The mail/news UI hangs (shows an hourglass cursor indefinitely) when you open a
local folder that has been altered (message appended) by external process.


Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a local folder.
2. In the folder view, select some folder other than the one just created.
3. Use some other process to append a message to the new folder (FetchYahoo in
my case, but even a text editor should do the trick).
4. Select the new folder.

Actual Results:  
The result is often (maybe 50% of the time) that you'll get an hourglass cursor
indefinitely. It doesn't seem to matter if there are already messages in the
folder or not. It appears that Mozilla gets confused when the index doesn't
match the mailbox.

The workaround is to exit and restart. Not too inconvenient with Thunderbird,
but a pain with the integrated browser/mail products.

Expected Results:  
Display the list of messages in the folder.


This bug dates back to Netscape 6, if not before, but has been observed most
recently in Netscape 7.01, Mozilla 1.4 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0;
en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624), and Thunderbird 0.2a (20030807).

I'm surprised more people haven't encountered this problem, as local delivery by
another process used to be commonplace on UNIX. It's possible this is a Windows
only bug, but bug #100709 might suggest otherwise.

Related bugs: bug #100709 as mentioned above is the closest, though it specifies
an IMAP folder rather than a local folder, and was on a Linux platform. Bug
#31938 is a bit different scenario, but same symptoms.

Comment 1

[Tom Metro]

(In reply to comment #0)
> The mail/news UI hangs (shows an hourglass cursor indefinitely) when you open 
> a local folder that has been altered (message appended) by external process.

This bug was cured around about Thunderbird release 0.6 ~ 0.8.
Marking as FIXED.


> I'm surprised more people haven't encountered this problem, as local delivery 
> by another process used to be commonplace on UNIX.

It would have been nice if someone pointed this out, but about a year after
reporting this bug I ran across the "movemail" information:

http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/movemail.html
http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/movemail/

which made it clear that Mozilla was never designed to handle external apps
modifying the local folders, even on UNIX.

 -Tom

Comment 2

[Jason Bassford]

No specific bug / patch identified as the fix.

-> WORKSFORME.