272527 - Message is not displayed in folder or missing from thread - Disappearing email messages

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[Ramdas Lamb]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

Every few days one or two email messages that I have already downloaded and read
disappear.  I check the Trash, but they are nowhere to be found. I restart
Mozilla (1.7.3) and even restart Windows (2000) but they are gone.

Reproducible: Didn't try
Steps to Reproduce:
1. I cannot reproduce it.  It happens on its own.
2.
3.



Expected Results:  
I do not want to lose random emails.

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

Do you use POP or IMAP accounts?

Comment 2

[OstGote!]

Reporter per e-mail: I use POP account.

Comment 3

[Jerome Bullert]

We're seeing this behavior in ManyOne browser builds based on Mozilla 1.7.3

The affected user is accessing an IMAP mailbox.

The behavior that we're seeing is:

-Some messages, once they are marked read, are not displayed in the message list
when the View is "All" and there are is no filtering. It seems that the messages
are still there in the mailbox, they're just not being listed because...
-The messages do show up if you filter for Sender or Subject containing @ or .,
or anything else that matches the message.
-If marked "Unread", the message will then display as expected.
-Not all messages are affected; in fact, most are not.

For affected messages, with View set to "All":
1. Message arrives, is "Unread" and correctly appears in the message list.
2. User views the message, which changes to "Read", and then does anything that
refreshes the message list. (Re-sort, view another folder and then return, etc.)
3. The message no longer appears in the list. (With View still set to "All" and
no filtering.)
4. The user filters for Sender or Subject containing @ or . (or anything else
that matches the message), which also causes the message list to refresh.
5. The message appears in this filtered message list.
6. If the user marks the message as "Unread" and then refreshes the list, the
message again appears in the un-filtered list, as in step 1 above.

Note that, when marked "Read", the affected message appears in the filtered
list, or in a filtered view, but not in the un-filtered list in the "All" view.

Comment 4

[Jerome Bullert]

Rambdas,

Can you confirm that when you enter a period into the "Subject or Sender
contains" filter field, the missing messages are then displayed?

The answer to this will help us to isolate the location of this bug.

Comment 5

[Jay Patel [:jay]]

Need more investigation and a patch on the Trunk before we consider this for the
branch.

Comment 6

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

confirming

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I just saw the following problem in Thunderbird 1.0.2 Mac from mozilla.org:

My Inbox (on IMAP) showed in the folder pane 1 unread msg. "View All" was
selected in the msg pane, yet it was completely empty (I move all msgs out of
inbox). So, folder pane showed an unread msg that I couldn't get to. IIRC, I
tried switching views, incl. to View Unread, but couldn't make it show up.
However, I just made it show up somehow, IIRC via View Unread. (sorry for being
so vage, I don't remember anymore.) It showed up with the following headers in
the msg pane:
Subject: empty
Sender: empty
Date: 1970-01-01 01:00 (I am on CET)
Size: 1KB
When I opened it, via View Source and normal standalone msg window, it looked
normal, with correct headers and body (apart from being spam :) ). It of course
dropped from View Unread after switching View back and forth, because it was no
longer unread. None of the default Views made it show up, but a custom-made View
"Date before 2005-07-08" made it show up again.

I copied INBOX.msf etc. on the filesystem, I'll attach them as well as the msg
source. I won't attach the INBOX file itself with the msgs, because it's 15 MB
large despite my inbox being empty (that's another bug, appearantly never
flushes, not even when Compacting).

Comment 8

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Attachment: Incident 1: INBOX.msf

I replaced "bucksch" and "beonex" with "mydomain".

Comment 9

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Attachment: Incident 1: The disappearing email

Comment 10

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I should emphasize that my inbox should be completely empty, because I move all
msgs to other folders. Msg pane shows no mails (apart from the described). The
Inbox.msf shows a few other mails, which I know nothing about, maybe there are
more unread msgs lurking and disappeared, I don't know.

Comment 11

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Attachment: Incident 1 (delayed): mailViews.dat

I just realized that mailViews.dat is also relevant. Attaching my current
version of it. It includes the view that I created as workaround for this bug.

Comment 12

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Need more investigation and a patch on the Trunk before we consider this for the
> branch.

Jay, I'm trying to figure this one out now, and one thing I notice from reading
bug commentaries is that all instances appear to point to the 1.7 series of
builds.  That is, there's no indication here that the bug exists in 1.8 trunk.

Could this bug be a dupe of a 1.8 series bug?  I'm not familiar with mail/news
issues in general.

Comment 13

[David :Bienvenu]

Ben, if you ran with a trunk build (e.g., 1.1a2), the compact would most likely
succeed - there was a bug that prevented compaction from finishing in some
situations in 1.0x

Comment 14

[Harshad Patel]

I find that mail disappears from the inbox sometimes even as it is loaded from
the mail server. I also find my entire contents from sent and archives folders
disappear. This is a riddiculous situation that might foce me to adopt EUDORA or
OPERA as my mail client. Incidentally my old Netscape 7.2 also showed same bug.
Is some virus affecting the ENTIRE MOZILLA org.? 

Comment 15

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

MozillaAS v1.7.x is not supported anymore.
NS7.2 is not our product.
Thunderbird v1.0.x is not supported anymore.

Can you reproduce with SeaMonkey v1.1.9 ?
(or Thunderbird v2.0.0.14 ?)

Comment 16

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

(almost 3 years later)

No reply from reporter(s).

(Would have been "Incomplete", now is) R.Invalid

Reopen if you can reproduce with SeaMonkey v1.1.9.
(or Thunderbird v2.0.0.14 ?)

Comment 17

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Ben,
Why did you reopen this bug ?

Comment 18

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Because you closed it for no good reason. Lack of response or comment noise is not a good reason. This bug has detailed information and proofs, and is critical.

Comment 19

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

FYI, investigation of this bug costed a lot of time, as you can see from the comments.

Comment 20

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

OK, this sucker bug is back for me.

I have a message which I new is there (I read it and replied to it), but I couldn't see. I can see the replies, but not the thread starter (in this case, could be any). Searching for it using Quick search made it show up. Clearing quick search makes it disappear again.

I'll attach two screen shots. I include only the date and quick search field, not the subjects, for privacy, but you can see that the quick search state shows a message from 13.10.2008 which does not show with no filters. (Of course, the quick search also makes some other mails disappear, but that's expected - it's a filter.) You can see that the messages are sorted by date, so it must appear at exactly the place shown, but does not.

Reproduction:
1. Open folder without any filter (no view filter, no quick search)
2. Enter part of the subject of the missing mail as quick search

Actual result:
1. See screenshot missing-1.png - Mail from 13.10.2008 does not show up
2. See screenshot missing-2.png - Mail from 13.10.2008 does show up

Expected result:
Mail from 13.10.2008 does shows up in both cases

Additional comments:
This is exactly the bug that initial description and comment 3 describe.

I think this is caused by a corrupted .msf file. Comment 7 talks about that, and I also recently had quite a few crashes, causing other problems around .msf files, e.g. bug 455766 and maybe bug 457097. However, this one is the worst, as it causes mail to be missing (not to be found).

Comment 21

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Attachment: Incident 2: Without filters. Mail from 13.10.2008 is missing, but should show up

Comment 22

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Attachment: Incident 2: With Quick Search. Mail from 13.10.2008 shows up as expected.

Comment 23

[theresa]

Have the same issue. New emails come in and inbox was bolded (indicating unread emails). However, new emails do not show up in inbox. When changing view option to "view unread" the email appears. The email does not seem to have been deleted (email remains searchable, and can be seen through webmail access). Once the email is moved to a folder, the email sticks and does not disappear again.

This appears after I added two add-ons: Lightening (calendar) and Provide for Google Calendar (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631) - not sure if they are relevant to this issue. I use IMAP.

This incident is slightly different from described in comment #3, as the new email does not appear in "Show All" even if it is labelled as "unread".

Thunderbird version version 2.0.0.21 (20090302). This did not happen until today. Could the add-ons result in interferences?

Comment 24

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

threading issue?

Comment 25

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ben do you still experience this?