370234 - Count of unread news posts is very often wrong

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 79130

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[walter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070212 Minefield/3.0a3pre
Build Identifier: trunk (very old bug)

(Note:  this applies only to newsgroups, not to mail.)

When I click on the twisty for a news server (to display all
of my subscribed groups) I can see the 'unread article'
count update as I watch.

The problem is that these updated counts are very often (but
not always) wildly wrong.

Then, when I click on a group to read it, I can see the
counts update a second time, this time correctly.

Alas, whenever the original count turns out to be wrong, any
article I select refuses to appear in the preview window.

I can see from watching my network traffic that no bytes at
all are sent to the news server, so it's no surprise that 
the server doesn't send the selected article.

I can correct this situation by double-clicking an article,
which opens in a separate window as expected.  Then I can
go back to the header pane and all works properly after 
that.


Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.



This bug appeared in Thunderbird trunk many moons ago.  I
didn't report it back then because I figured that someone
would fix it soon since it's such an obvious and annoying
problem.  I'd be surprised if this isn't a duplicate, but
I looked and didn't see anything similar.

Comment 1

[Chris Malton]

Same here in Trunk for 3.0.
Adds one to messages count every 30 seconds or so.

Comment 2

[Chris Malton]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Same here in Trunk for 3.0.
> Adds one to messages count every 30 seconds or so.
> 

Note that this happens for my global inbox.

Comment 3

[Dennis McCunney]

I've seen this since the early NS 7 suite days.  The .rc file for news servers is not always correctly updated, so inaccurate lists of read/unread messages are displayed.  The folder pane will report X unread messages for a group, but no unread messages actually exist when you select the group to read.  It will not affect all newsgroups on a server.  Most will be correct, and one or two will have sticky wrong info, as though that line in the .rc file was being skipped.

I believe this only bites if you do everything online, downloading only headers, then downloading actual message bodies as you read them.  If you maintain a local message store for offline use, I believe the counts in the .rc file will be accurate.

Comment 4

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Summary looks to say same phenomenon as Bug 160963(and DUP bugs of it) which was closed as DUP of old(before Mozilla 1.0) Bug 79130.

Comment 5

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Duping to  Bug 79130