282007 - After large Outlook Express import, unusual contact and mailing list behavior. Possible address book corruption.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 222774

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[silcndude]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041007 Galeon/1.3.18 (Debian package 1.3.18-1.1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041007 Galeon/1.3.18 (Debian package 1.3.18-1.1)

Situation:
I did an import of my friend's fairly large Outlook Express address book into
Thunderbird 1.0.  Most of the contacts appeared to be imported correctly. 
However, it did not properly import his OE mailing lists. (they were created but
empty.. see existing bugs)

Trigger:
When I tried to drag contacts to the empty lists, they were added, but duplicate
contacts were created in the address book as well.  These contact entries had
the same display name as the originals but all the other data was either empty
or a copy of some random other contact.  I deleting the imported empty lists and
created a new "test" list.  The behavior was the same.  I then deleted /
recreated the MAB.  In Outlook Express, I deleted all lists and contact folders
so that the import would only be straight contacts.  After doing the import into
Thunderbird, I created a new "test" list and the behavior was again identical.

I verified that this behavior only occurs after an Outlook Express import by
creating a clean address book, clean contacts, and experimenting with list
management by drag/drop.  I suspect that the import process may be causing some
sort of MAB data corruption which is triggering unusual behavior.  If it wasn't
his personal data, I would submit the MAB file as evidence, but alas I cannot.

I have not been able to replicate this behavior in the Linux version (also 1.0),
but in my cases the import(s) were via LDIF.  If I can, I will obtain a copy of
his possibly corrupted MAB and see how it reacts with the Linux version.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Do a large Outlook Express import (~150+ contacts, many with extensive field
usage)
2. Create a new mailing list.
3. Drag a contact into the newly created mailing list.

Actual Results:  
Contact dragged into the mailing list is duplicated in the address book.  Its
display name is the same as the original but the other fields are empty or invalid.

Expected Results:  
It should simply add the contact to the mailing list as usual.

I marked this as severity: major because of the data corruption possibility, but
I am not sure what is going on programmatically, so this may be an
overestimation.  My biggest concern arises from the fact that the invalid
duplicate entries were sometimes created with bogus data from elsewhere.  An
unsuspecting user may not notice this problem immediately.. possibly not until
after his/her address book is heavily corrupted.  Or this may be a sign of a
larger problem.. overflow, OOB, missing input validation, etc.

Comment 1

[Stephanie Warrick]

I imported a large (~600 contact) Address Book from OE today, and saw the same
error. All of my mailing lists were created in Thunderbird, but they were all
empty. None of the contacts in those mailing lists had extensive field usage -
in fact, all had minimal field usage.

The first time I tried to import the Address Book from OE, only 69 contacts were
imported before Thunderbird announced that the import had finished successfully.
The second time I tried, all the contacts were imported, apparently successfully.

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

fix will be in 1.1

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 222774 ***