295312 - Gmail POP3 often presents empty mailbox; Thunderbird then reports all mails as new again

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Kurt Pruenner]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.0.2 (20050317)

Recently, I kept getting "86 new messages" when checking my Gmail account, even
though I maybe get 1 new mail per day. Some digging turns out that Gmail
sometimes presents a fake empty account saying "+OK Backend is offline.  Showing
you an empty mailbox. Sorry."

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get messages from Gmail using POP3
2. Get 86 new messages
3. Mark all messages as read
4. Get messages from Gmail again
5. Thunderbird reports "No new messages on server", empties out Inbox(?!?)
6. Get messages from Gmail yet again
7. Get the same 86 new messages you got in step 2

Actual Results:  
I got the same 86 messages twice as new messages, and my Inbox mysteriously
emptied out when it shouldn't have - this isn't IMAP, after all.

Expected Results:  
Even if Gmail is flakey, Thunderbird shouldn't empty the Inbox if the server
says it's empty; also, since the UIDLs in the working case are the same the
mails also shouldn't be downloaded twice if the Inbox weren't emptied.

I'll attach debug logs for both cases.

Comment 1

[Kurt Pruenner]

Attachment: POP3 log when Gmail is flakey

Comment 2

[Kurt Pruenner]

Attachment: POP3 log when Gmail works

Shortened a bit since the actual contents of the mails are rather irrelevant.

Comment 3

[Jason Tamez]

I have a similar problem. Whenever Thunderbird fetches new mail from Gmail, it
also "fetches" three or four other old emails, all of which contain attachments
that put them over the limit for my personal download settings. (Gmail account
settings, Disk Space -> To save disk space, do not download [*] messages larger
than [50] KB) The "new" messages replace my old ones (which just say 'File
Truncated', etc.), so I'm not sure if they're really being downloaded anew, or
if Thunderbird's being flakey.

This happened once with Thunderbird 1.0, but since I've upgraded to 1.2 it's
happened every single time I have any new mail on that account.

Comment 4

[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:
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Comment 5

[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.