332347 - deleted mails reappear in trash and original folder after relaunch of application

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Christian]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: confirmed on Thunderbird versions 1.0 & 1.5

We delete mails, then empty the trash. Trash is then shown as empty. 
After relaunch of Thunderbird, the deleted mails appear again - as well in the original location as also in the trash.

Deleting trash.sbd contents and substituting "Trash" and "Trash.msf" files with empty files successfully empties the trash permanently.

I also noticed that popstate.dat is not accessible, even if t-bird is not running (user rights are correct, no Thunderbird process is running, re-login of user does not help)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Delete mails and empty trash
2. Relaunch Thunderbird
3. Original mails and trashed mails (duplicate) reappear 

Actual Results:  
Not possible to trash mails, except when manually deleting the trash system files.

Expected Results:  
Mails should be permanently deleted

Comment 1

[Leos Literak]

It occured to me once too. I deleted a lot of emails from Trash and when I restarted TB next day, deleted emails were back. This occured on IMAP server.

Comment 2

[faber.vanmolkot]

I have the same problem (every time) the mails don't reappear on the original location though...
I won't go deleting and replacing files like trash.sbd or trash.smf...
we hav a server that has all our email accounts accesible throug imap.
what I do now is just have outlook express with all the email accounts on my pc and every week I empty all the trash in outlook.

I hope this will be fixed because T-bird is better then outlook imo

faber

Comment 3

[Alan]

I'm having exactly the same problem and it's becoming a real headache. I'm using an IMAP connection and every time the mail server is restarted, Thunderbird restores into EVERY message that has been deleted (manually or b/c it was junk). I'm hoping that this would be fixed soon as this is a real pain. 

Alan

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

The imap and pop3/local problems are different, I'm sure. The local mail problem is specific to your setup somehow, since I've never heard of this problem before - most people's local trash works fine. It almost sounds like some other application or process is interfering with the emptying of the trash.

The IMAP problem sounds like a server issue, especially if restarting the server causes the issue: - an IMAP protocol log might help: http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html#imap

Comment 5

[Alan]

Thanks David, I wasn't aware of this logging capability for TB. I just tried it and it turns out that the mail server I'm using (Mercury/32) did not reflect the update to the message status sent by TB until I shut TB down. Not sure if the problem is with TB (e.g., not sending a final confirmation) or the mail server (e.g., caching commands until the connection is closed) but at least I now have a workaround. 

Is there a "Commit"-like command in the IMAP protcol? If there is, is there a way to trigger that from within TB?

Thanks,
Alan

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

There are a couple levels of "commit" for adding the deleted flag in IMAP. The first is the "check" command - this tells the server to persist any flag changes so that other simulataneously active sessions see the changes, but it might convince your imap server to persist the flags. If this is your INBOX, we use "check" to check for new mail instead of "noop" every fifth check for new mail. You can add the integer pref "mail.imap.noop_check_count" and set it to 1, using the config editor under tools | options | advanced | general, config editor. Every check for new mail will now issue a "check" command.

The second level of commit is to issue an expunge - this tells the server to really delete the messages with the deleted flag set. If you do a context menu compact this folder command on an imap folder, it will expunge the folder.

If you're running a 2.0 beta build, you can set the hidden boolean pref "mail.imap.expunge_after_delete" to true, and we will expunge a folder after every delete from the folder. This is not a nice thing to do with the server but you can use it if you want.

If you have control over the restarting of your server, I'd suggest just doing a file | compact folders before restarting the server.