361806 - Auto-compacting to avoid truncinating errors

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 286888

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Felix M]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.5.0.8 (20061025)

Sometimes TB shows the following alert when/after looking for new messages:

"Error truncinating the Inbox after filtering a message for folder 'xyz'. You may need to shutdown Thunderbird and delete INBOX.msf.".

The result is that the newest messages are not shown properly. Instead of displaying the content of the message, a previous message is shown (header with sender, title etc as well as the body). 

For information: I've about five POP3 accounts that are checked simultaneously. They're all using the Global Inbox but are filtered into different sub folders. 

As you can read in this mozillazine thread (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2611501), Daifne assumed that the error occurs because I didn't compact my folders (which I indeed didn't do). But unfortunately, deleting Inbox.msf didn't help and the messages were still being displayed incorrect.

Since in my eyes, the loss of the content of messages is quite critical, I'd suggest that TB compacts folders automatically whenever it thinks the time has come to do it. One can't assume that the average user will remember to compact the folders regularly. And loosing messages will definitely frighten off users from using TB. 

Daifne states that errors could also occur if something else takes place during the compacting. But I think one could also disable all critical Gui-Items or operations during the process. Or maybe one could create a 'shadow-copy' of the messages, compacting them in the background and replace the actual files if the compacting was successful and the contents didn't change in the meantime. That's imaginable like double-buffering in graphics :-).

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
Can't tell how to reproduce this. Sorry!

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

see bug 286888 comment 10 and bug 337554 for reasons why auto-compact is a bad idea.

Comment 2

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

This will get fixed when bug #286888 lands.

Reporter, if you want you can vote for bug #286888.

Comment 3

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This will get fixed when bug #286888 lands.
> 
> Reporter, if you want you can vote for bug #286888.

You could have closed that one as a duplicate :-)