304974 - Incorrect new mail notification on IMAP mailboxes

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Mike Brodbelt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050802 Debian/1.7.10-1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050802 Debian/1.7.10-1

Thunderbird (tested with 1.0.2) displays incorrect behaviour when new mail
arrives on an IMAP account. Here's a quote from one of my users:-

"sometimes I get told I have 9 new messages come in when I 
have none - or 24 when 1 arrives and things like that....any ideas?"

Setup in use is Thunderbird v 1.0.2, Cyrus IMAP version 2.1, TB set to use IMAP
IDLE. Messages are filtered on the server using Sieve. The TB pref
check_all_imap_folders_for_new is set to true.

Could this be a threading issue, where a new message arrives, one thread marks
it read, but the \Seen status isn't updated on the server?

There are a lot of bugs filed on similar issues to this - enough that I suspect
there is more than one underlying problem that needs to be isolated. As such,
this bug report may (or may not) be related to the following bugs:-

228168
279783
263367
252484
301583
253341

In my specific case the bug happens all the time (we tend to turn off the new
mail notification), but seems to affect only the notifier - the unread counts on
the folders themselves are OK, though the counts in the popup window are incorrect.

I think this probably needs someone with some knowledge of the notifier and IMAP
code to try and separate out the underlying problems.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[u63580]

Please can you test with a recent nightly build.  TB 1.0.2 is based on old code,
and the trunk has changed a lot since then!

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #0)
> There are a lot of bugs filed on similar issues to this - enough that I
> suspect there is more than one underlying problem that needs to be isolated.
> As such, this bug report may (or may not) be related to the following bugs:
[
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=252484,253341,263367,279783
 - and -
bug 228168, bug 301583
]

My first guess when I saw this bug's summary was that this was a dupe of 
bug 228168, but after close examination, that's the one that your bug is not, 
since you/your users are complaining about notification of *more* mail than 
arrives.  Bug 301583 appears to be about a specific situation of reading mail 
from multiple machines simultaneously, and isn't really about the notification 
so much as the falsely bolded Inbox.

It's unclear whether this same problem is exhibiting on both IMAP and POP; some 
people claim it to be so.

Can you attach an imap protocol log of a session where you get false or 
overreported mail notification?

http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html#imap


Altho running with a trunk-based (or now, a branch-based) version could be 
useful for testing, I'm unaware of any fixes to notification.  However, you 
definitely should be running 1.0.6 rather than 1.0.2.

Comment 3

[Mike Brodbelt]

OK - I ran the client with an imap trace on, and am attaching the log. After
starting TB with the logging option on, it almost immediately reported 1 new
message in the notifier popup window, even though the user's INBOX had no new mail.

This is still from TB 1.0.2 - I deploy everything from centralised MSI based
installs, and haven't managed to repackage 1.0.6 here yet. If you need logs from
a trunk build I'll have to install that on a test machine.

Comment 4

[Mike Brodbelt]

Attachment: Gzipped IMAP Protocol trace

Comment 5

[Jesse Glick]

Re. GUI pref: see bug #289208.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mike, 

Do you see this in v1.5? (or trunk http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-trunk/ )
Did you intentionally file this as a windows bug?

your response would be ... helpful.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> incomplete - no reponse
but please reopen if you still see in version 2