306888 - Thunderbird IMAP not truly purging deleted emails

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 227371

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Jim Strickland]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050627 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: version 1.0+ (20050712)

This problem has been duplicated on both Mac and PC. I have not tested Linux.
This problem is occuring with the following email server: Post.Office v3.6.3
release 105. Whenever emails in an IMAP account using Thunderbird are purged,
they are no longer being displayed by Thunderbird, but they are remaining in the
account folder on the email server. They aren't displayed anymore by
Thunderbird, but they are seen and sometimes displayed by other email clients.
Outlook sees every email that Thunderbird supposedly had purged. However, the
email is marked for deletion and grayed out. Since it is grayed out, it can't be
purged by Outlook. I know the actual email is still there because Outlook can
undelete it and still read it.

In my case, Thunderbird shows only 300 email headers in my IMAP account, but If
I access the account using Outlook, it is seeing AND displaying all 3900 emails.
That means that over the past month I have supposedly purged 3600 emails through
Thunderbird, that are actually not purging. Apple's mail shows that it is going
through all 3900 headers, but then only displays those that were not "purged" by
Thunderbird. I think that even Thunderbird is seeing all of the other emails
because as time goes on, it takes longer to display the headers for this IMAP
account.

Currently, the only way I can remove these files is to temporarily move all
displayed emails to my local folder. Then I have to go into terminal on the
email server and delete all files in the folder for my specific IMAP account.
Once I do this, I can go through Thunderbird and move all of the legitimate
emails back into the IMAP account from the local folder. However, the problem I
have now is that Apple Mail, and Outlook both see the received date for every
email as the current date.

I have experienced this problem on multiple IMAP accounts using both the latest
stable release of Thunderbird and trunk builds, on both Windows XP and MacOS
10.3.9. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Using Thunderbird with an IMAP account, Mark an email for deletion.
2.Compact all folders to force a purge

-OR-

3.If you have the account set to purge when Thunderbird is closed, close
Thunderbird.

Actual Results:  
The emails no longer show up in Thunderbird but they are still on the server and
are still seen by other email clients accessing that account.

Expected Results:  
When the purge command is sent from Thunderbird, all emails marked for deletion
should be truly removed from the server.

I am using Post.Office v3.6.3 release 105 for an email server, however, I have
heard that it is happening to some other people using other email servers.

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 227371 ***