362314 - thunderbird thinks I have an unread message when I don't

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Vicky Bilaniuk]

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 1.5.0.8

Sorry, but I can't write up a good bug report for this.  All I can do is tell you what I did before it happened.  All I did was check my mail.  The program seemed to pause an exceptionally long time on one message (which turned out to not be very big - just your basic one page text message), and then all seemed well, except that the number of unread messages was one higher than what it should have been.  So in more detail:

1.  Checked mail.
2.  Program downloaded mail but paused a long time on one message.
3.  It ran my filters (I have one that I created for a listserv I'm on, plus my junk mail filter, which I had only just today set to non-training mode) and sorted out the mail.
4.  Unread mail count in folder which contains my listserv mail was fine
5.  Unread mail count in inbox was 1 too many

I tried many things to reduce that inbox to 0 unread messages:
1.  I deleted all of the mail in the inbox (nope).
2.  I hit get mail many times (nope).
3.  I downloaded and installed Thunderbird version 3 alpha 1, which produced a C++ runtime error on installation, lol, but nope - still says I have an unread message (and yes I'm running version 3 alpha 1, apparently, despite the error, or maybe it only thinks it's version 3 alpha 1, ahem).
4.  I went to my ISP's webmail page and checked there, to see if, indeed, there was an unread message.  There was not.  There were, however, many messages there, as I have Thunderbird set to leave them on the server for a week, but I saw all of those messages get downloaded.  But to be safe, I deleted them all using my ISP's webmail interface.  Hit get mail in Thunderbird, didn't fix it.

I'm out of things to try.  Thunderbird insists that I have an unread message, but I don't.  I've read other bugs where there really was an unread message, but changing my view from read to unread threads reveals nothing, and besides, there's nothing on my ISPs server now anyway.

Something clearly went wrong, here, but I don't know what and I'm sorry but I can't help you pinpoint it because I think that reproducing it will probably be impossible (at least for me).  I didn't pay attention to see if there were any error messages when it paused on the download of that one message (I don't remember seeing anything, but I can't be 100% certain).  

Reproducible: Didn't try




If you can't figure out what went wrong, then perhaps consider incorporating a simple check and recalculation of how many messages there really are whenever it checks for new messages?  It's just an idea (and possibly not a very good one, but I wanted to toss something out there).

Comment 1

[Vicky Bilaniuk]

Oh one thing I forgot...  It *seemed* (can't be totally positive) that the count problem occurred during sorting by the filters.  I remember watching it and something just didn't seem right.

Comment 2

[Vicky Bilaniuk]

*** Bug 362315 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Vicky Bilaniuk]

*sigh* one more thing I forgot...  It's a POP server that I'm using (not IMAP like those other bugs).

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

In the nightly builds for tb 2.0 (and 3) there are the option to "rebuild index" in the folder properties dialog. Try that, and if it doesn't work, delete the .msf file for the folder (it will get re-generated). Does that work for you?

Comment 5

[Vicky Bilaniuk]

OK deleting the .msf file fixed it up.  What it did, exactly, after I deleted the .msf file, was first still say it had the wrong number of unread messages, but when I clicked on the inbox to see the messages, it corrected itself.  The rebuild option didn't work, by the way.  I tried that first.  I kept a copy of the old .msf file just in case (if anyone wants it for some reason).

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

-> WFM since deleting the .msf file made things work again.