408085 - Cannot save filters. Filters are not retained between sessions.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 390992

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Tom Fredian]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.9 (20071031)

When I add a new message filter and then close the Message Filters dialog box there is a noticeable pause before the window closes and the msgFilterRules.dat file remains at 0 bytes.

I've reinstalled Thunderbird multiple times but still have the same problem. I've even removed all old profiles, cleaned out any registry references to Thunderbird, removed the Thunderbird directory from "Program Files" but still have the same behavior.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Run Thunderbird
2.Select Tools->Message Filters...
3.Create a message filter
4.Close "Message Filters" window (I see a pause before this window closes)
5.Exit Thunderbird
6.Bring up Message Filters again and it is empty.
Actual Results:  
Pause when closing "Message Filters" window and filters not saved.

Expected Results:  
The message filters I have created should have been retained between invocations of Thunderbird.

I'm using no special add ons. My email account is an imap account. I'm running on a 64-bit Vista platform.

I have Google Desktop installed which does index my email but the behavior is the same independent of whether Google Desktop is running or not.

This problem started after attempting to fix another problem I was having with Thunderbird. At one point, Thunderbird got into a state where the application stalled for several seconds each time it checked for new mail. Deleting and re-adding the mail account had no effect. Only re-installing Thunderbird corrected this problem but I now cannot get the filters to work.

Comment 1

[Tom Fredian]

I found some errors in the Error Console which may help identify the problem:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0xc1f30001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED) [nsIMsgFilterList.saveToDefaultFile]"  nsresult: "0xc1f30001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED)"  location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger/content/FilterListDialog.js :: onFilterClose :: line 396"  data: no]

Comment 2

[Tom Fredian]

I think I have identified the problem. It seems that Thunderbird has been attempting to save the filters on a non-existent ldap server instead of in the file. Not sure how this got configured this way. I managed to fix it by changing Account Settings->Composition & Addressing "Use a different LDAP server: None". I can't seem to locate where one sets a "global LDAP server" anyway.

I think this should still be considered a bug but I seem to have found a workaround.

Thanks,
Tom

Comment 3

[Tom Fredian]

Sorry. The last comment about ldap is erroneous. That change had no effect. I was confused because I had the Error Console up in my last test so Thunderbird never really exited. I still cannot save the filters. Each time I close the Message Filter panel, the above error shows up in the Error Console.

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Could it be caused from your earlier tweaking? Have you tried creating a new thudnderbird profile (thunderbird.exe -P) and does it work there?

Comment 5

[Tom Fredian]

I've completely cleaned my system of all traces of thunderbird including deinstalling it, removing any registry traces of it, removing everything under and including AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird and AppData\Local\Thunderbird.

When a clean install is performed it creates a new profile and the problem persists.

I also just tried using the thunderbird.exe -P and created a new profile. Same behavior. The Error Console showed the same error message included above and no filters were saved.

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Could it be a problem with some tmp filter files (tmprules-xxx.dat) not getting deleted? There are a few bugs open about that. So, to test, clean up out your system tmp files. xref bug 375292.

Comment 7

[Tom Fredian]

BINGO!!!! You got it. That's exactly what the problem was. For some reason there were a slew of these tmp filter files in my Temp directory. It appears that at one point they were being created automatically at a fixed interval perhaps once each time it checked for new messages. I did a disk clean up and it fixed the problem! Thanks for the suggestion. I looked through the existing bugs but I would never have found that bug report since it's title does not contain the string "filter".
Anyway, thanks so much for tracking this down for me.

-tom

Comment 8

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Duping to bug 390992, may be solved through bug 375292.