Closed Bug 324085 Opened 19 years ago Closed 13 years ago

Compact folders shows no progress or completion messages in the statusbar

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Mail Window Front End
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
minor

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: bugzilla, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Keywords: polish) 

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.5 (20051201); Mac OS X 10.3.9

Previous versions of Thunderbird showed a progress bar in the statusbar while folders were being compacted. This is missing in version 1.5.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select File -> "Compact folders"

Actual Results:  
No message about compact folder progress or completion appears in the status bar.

Expected Results:  
Message about compact folder progress or completion appears in the status bar.

Related bugs: 271095 and 181627.
Not linkified above: Bug 271095 and Bug 181627.
Keywords: polish
Version: unspecified → 1.5
I have reproduced this bug on a separate machine, also running Thunderbird 1.5 (20051201); Mac OS X 10.3.9.
For reasons that completely escape me, the compact folders progress and completion messages now appear in the status bar of both my installs => WFM.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 19 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
Now, on both installs, compact folders progress and completion messages /do not/ appear in the status bar. Seems this problem is intermittent. Reopening.
Status: RESOLVED → UNCONFIRMED
Resolution: WORKSFORME → ---
Now reproducible! Modified steps to reproduce:

1. Start Thunderbird.
2. Open an arbitrary email in a separate window
   (select an email message and choose Message -> Open Message).
3. Close message window.
4. Select File -> "Compact folders".

Result: No message about compact folder progress or completion appears in the status bar.

If steps 2 and 3 are omitted, i.e. Compact Folders is run before a message has been viewed in a separate window, then the messages about compact folder progress and completion does appear in the status bar.

Could someone please confirm this?

(In reply to comment #5)
> Now reproducible! Modified steps to reproduce:
> 
> 1. Start Thunderbird.
> 2. Open an arbitrary email in a separate window
>    (select an email message and choose Message -> Open Message).
> 3. Close message window.
> 4. Select File -> "Compact folders".
> 
> Result: No message about compact folder progress or completion appears in the
> status bar.
> 
> If steps 2 and 3 are omitted, i.e. Compact Folders is run before a message has
> been viewed in a separate window, then the messages about compact folder
> progress and completion does appear in the status bar.
> 
> Could someone please confirm this?
> 

howdy jwq,

hah! [*grin*] i have had this problem for months and couldn't narrow it down. new profiles seemed to work and then stop working. safemode seemed to work and then mysteriously stop working. 

i can confirm your steps to reproduce the problem. 

my tb info ...
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051201 Thunderbird/1.5 - Build ID: 2005120115

it seems that status bar msgs stop updating. i have "done compacting folders" still on my statusbar and things like msg copy/move/junk-filter-moves no longer show on the statusbar.

take care,
lee


(In reply to comment #6)
> it seems that status bar msgs stop updating. i have "done compacting folders"
> still on my statusbar and things like msg copy/move/junk-filter-moves no
> longer show on the statusbar.
> 
howdy y'all,

the info above about OTHER statusbar msgs no longer working is wrong. i just needed a large enuf msg to give the statusbar time to display.

the compact folders statusbar msg and progress meter still fail - as described in c#5. sorry for the wrong info ...

take care,
lee





*** Bug 325796 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
mscott.  I duped 325796 to this.  it was filed against mail/news suite. is it okay to leave this as product Thunderbird?
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
yeah that's fine. Thanks Tracy.
Target Milestone: --- → Thunderbird2.0
Since this apparently is not only a Thunderbird/Macintosh/MacOS issue the bug info needs to be updated in a suitable way to include the other products and platforms affected. If not, this issue won't show up e.g. when listing SeaMonkey issues, for which I originally filed Bug 325796 (on Windows).

The following things need - at least - be updated in the bug header:

Hardware - change to: PC (or ALL)
OS       - change to: all
Keywords - change to: polish regression (seamonkey - or whatever is needed in
                                         order to be able to find this bug when
                                         listing SeaMonkey and MAS related bugs)

or

Bug 324085 blocks: 325796

Else Bug 325796 might get lost since it has been marked as RESOLVED.
QA Contact: front-end
I see this from time to time in Windows XP. It is almost a dataloss bug, because if you try doing some other functions (get mail!) while a folder is compacting, those other functions will fail. This could even be blocking several or many other bugs for this very reason. In any event, OS should = all.
bug 329173 related?
OS: Mac OS X → All
Hardware: Macintosh → All
 This isn't related to Bug 329173 (see comment #5). The problem is that Thunderbird is trying to display the "compacting" messages on the status bar of a window that no longer exists.

 I typically run TB with View -> Layout set to Classic View /and/ with the message pane closed. If I open a message in a separate window, then close that window, the "compacting" messages are never displayed.

BTW if, after opening a message in a separate window, I switch to 3-pane view by opening the message pane in the main window then the "compacting" messages are displayed in the status bar of the main window.

My problem seems related.  I'm using Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 on XP and while copying many files from IMAP to a local folder, I seemed to get no status message and progress bar.  Eventually I noticed that if I had a separate email window open the progress bar would appear on the email window and not the main window!  If I closed the email window I subsequently got no progress bar at all!! (Sound familiar?)  If I open another email window I get the progress bar back during bulk copy operations, but on the wrong window!

Not sure what others think, but I'd mark this as more severe than "trivial".  To the untrained eye it looks like Thunderbird has hung, tempting the user to kill it as a runaway process.  This could lead to email loss (maybe if moving) or folder corruption.
For the record, it happens with SM branch on OS/2 also, and to me, it's worse than just trivial to not know when compacting each day's 1500+ trashed messages has completed.
I've noted in Bug 329173 that for local folders using trunk build I see "done compacting".  

irrc, I've seen mentioned that one of the problems with "long actions" is their status messages can be clear by other actions.  Perhaps 2 status areas are needed?  With compact messages in red background? :)

Note there are 44 thunderbird bugs with compact in the summary  and a large number are dataloss.  8 more obscure TB bugs http://tinyurl.com/35sep3 and 22 core http://tinyurl.com/2kmxgz
Severity: trivial → major
I should mention that my comments apply strictly to compacting messages in a POP account (not IMAP). I rather assumed, from the original report, that this was the POP account compacting message bug (as opposed to the IMAP account compacting message bug, of which there is at least one).
Right now, the bug lists "Version: 	 1.5 ". Shouldn't this be changed, now that 1.5 has come and gone?
Assignee: mscott → nobody
Yes, this issue is still present, I still see it in Thunderbird 2.0.0.21. Changing Version to 2.0.
Version: 1.5 → 2.0
Target Milestone: Thunderbird2.0 → ---
Does anyone still see this problem in version 3.1?
It is true that progress is not shown, but with auto compact, and with File > Compact Folders one sees
 Compacting Folder .... 
or
 Compacting folder <name>
and when everythign is done, I see 
 Done

Also Bug 469050 - Compacting operation should be shown on Activity Manager window - may help some

The primary issues that need fixing, really, are 
a) automatic compact should *not* be happening frequently.  If compact is happening many times per day then your setting for auto compact is much too small, you are causing lots of extra work that causes greater likelihood of problems related to compacting.  The default 100kb is much too small. Use something that is closer to auto compacting once or twice a day or every couple days based on our message sizes. 1M or more might not be unreasonable in some cases.
b) reducing the amount of time for compacting. A couple such fixes landed in version 3 iirc.
c) eliminating the need for compacting (eg. alternative storage formats)

And in version 3, the current operation is IMO sufficient to avoid problems if one considers compact to cause dataloss.
Severity: major → minor
I can't reproduce this problem in 3.1 using the steps I wrote in Comment 5. I'd say this bug has been resolved.
WFM per jwq.  jwq - you can close your own bugs :)
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 19 years ago → 13 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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