256286 - Inbox on disc truncated to 0 bytes (or deleted)

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[Will Lockhart]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803

Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2)
Gecko/20040803

I had this happen to me yesterday. I have just upgraded to 1.7.2; in the morning I
had the first occurrence I've ever seen of one of the 'folder being processed'
bugs (#240969 for example). I restarted the Mozilla process and all was fine.

Then, in the afternoon, I realised I hadn't had received any emails for a while
(I leave the mail client running all the time). I tried clicking 'Get Msgs' a
few times, but I didn't see any status bar text updates (Connecting to server..,
etc), so I switched to another account (my ISP account) and tried to pick up my
messages for that account. That worked fine (no new messages, but the status
text updated to indicate it was talking to the server). I then switched back to
the first email account (my work account, both are POP accounts), at which point
the cursor turned into an hourglass. Switching back and forth between the two
accounts it was obvious that is was my work account that was locked.

So, I shut down Mozilla (normal shutdown) and restarted it, at which point I
found my Inbox was now empty. A quick check on the drive revealed that the
length of the Inbox file was now 0 bytes :( . An email arrived while I was
checking the Inbox and Inbox.msf files, not sure what state Inbox.msf was in
when the Inbox was empty, but it only had the single new email in it by the time
I got around to checking it.

Other relevant information:
1. My Inbox was *not* quarantined by A/V software. Nor were any of the emails I
received just before or just after the event infected.

2. I do run A/V software (Symantec Corporate A/V), with email scanning OFF and
file auto-protection ON.

3. My Inbox lives on a network drive (server is Windows 2003).

4. We had no (noticeable) LAN outages during the period when this occurred; i.e.
I have no reason to believe my local machine lost contact with the file server
at any point.

5. I don't have any email filters set up.

I realise there's not much to go on here. I thought initially this was a dupe of
#223103, but that appears to be where the user keeps their mail on the mail
server. I download my email and delete it from the server, the problem is losing
the Inbox file on the disc.

I'm afraid this isn't the kind of bug I particularly want to try and reproduce -
I've switched back to 1.3 now. Also, it's not clear what to do in order to
reproduce it; essentially nothing - I had mail set up to automatically check and
download new messages every 5 minutes, and that's all it was doing. Hate to file
it as critical, especially with so little detail, but loss of Inbox seems to
warrant it. Had a look for other possible dupes, but can't find anything that
quite matches this.

-- Will

Reproducible: Didn't try
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jason House]

I also had a similar problem this morning...

Thunderbird 0.8 had been open over the weekend.  When I tried to click on
e-mail, I got an error that thunderbird could not find the inbox file.  Thinking
that maybe it was just a fluke, I closed thunderbird and opened it again.  It
promptly downloaded new e-mail into the inbox but the new mail is all that is in
the inbox.  I did a scan of my harddrive for all multi-gig files and did not
find any sign of my inbox :(

It is a POP3 account where I download and then delete mail off the server.  I
created additional folders for filing mail, and it seems that all of those
folders are still intact (the folders are not under "Local Folders" but under
the e-mail account)

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.