471217 - Mac Mail won't import newer TB messages, after late October 2008, corresponding to release of latest release.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Migration, defect)

Description

[Rick C]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120121 Firefox/3.0.5
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.18 (20081105)

Mac mail won't import any message from TB newer than about 10/28/08 (not sure of exact cutoff date, but around late October).  All mailboxes import just fine.  All older messages import just fine. Messages newer than at least 10/28 won't import.  I posted to Apple, TB support, and also experts-exchange.  Lots of finger pointing to the other guy.  One suggestion was that the problem lies with TB, since the release date of 2.0.0.18 is early November, which could correlate the cut-off date for my message problem.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch TB
2. Launch Mac Mail
3. File | Import mailboxes | TB profile path
4. I get all mail boxes and only older mail messages.  Every time.
Actual Results:  
See above

Expected Results:  
Imported all messages, up to today's.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

As far as I can tell there we no Thunderbird specific changes to Mail between 2.0.0.17 and 2.0.0.18.

In any case, the fact that this is Apple Mail that can't import Thunderbird messages properly, means that it is an Apple Mail bug, not a Thunderbird bug, therefore you should raise a support issue with their support - even if Thunderbird did change something Apple mail would require fixing to support it, not the other way round.

Comment 2

[Rick C]

How can you tell from my description it is an Apple Mail bug?  You make an assertion with zero data to back it up.  This sounds like what Apple told me when I posted there: a TB bug without.  Each organization says it is the others responsibility to export/import properly. The one thing that points to a TB bug is that the release date for 2.0.1.18 corresponds with the dates that can't be imported.  Too coincidental.  I am not aware of any recent Mail release.  On the other hand I exported all of my mail boxes and I could see very recent dates in the file, leading me to conclude TB is exporting properly. As a result, it is conceivable that Mail is not importing correctly.  Why the particular date as the onset of the problem?

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

As far as I can tell, 2.0.0.18 was released on November 19th, not late October. 2.0.0.17 was September 25th.

I have looked again at the fixes between the two releases. The only ones that touched anywhere near mail storage code were bug 450991 and bug 450359. The latter is protecting against data loss when compacting folders of size greater than 2Gb. The former was fixing an order received index in files when the folder size is greater than 2Gb.

Now to your issue:

I determined that this is an apple mail bug on the basis that:

a) you are not reporting any issues with your use of Thunderbird,
b) You are importing using Apple Mail from Thunderbird - this is significant, none of the Thunderbird source code is being exercised in this action.
c) Even if one of the two issues I've mentioned above does affect importing into Apple Mail, it is Apple that needs to investigate this in the first instance - they have access to their source code - we don't. Granted it could be a bug introduced into Thunderbird, however, given the lack of any other evidence, and the lack of debugging capabilities due to Apple Mail being closed source, we are unfortunately unable to help.

If Apple Support investigate the issue and come back to us and say we have introduced a specific bug, then we'd be happy to fix it, but without evidence and the capability to find out what is happening, we are extremely restricted in what we can do.

Comment 4

[Rick C]

As noted previously, I have alerted Apple to this issue, and am trying to get them to look into it.  Hopefully they overcome their inertia and get over their "blame the other guy" mentality.

I am importing to Apple Mail from TB, as noted.  However, Apple Mail is exercising the TB code.  At least that is what Apple claims: the source email client needs to be running in order for Apple Mail to import.  So I don't think that Apple Mail is merely reading the TB database.  

Did TB change the way it writes its mailbox folder or message database with the most recent release?  The date coincidence is too close.

I am not programming guru.  However, I have written a lot of code over the years, and I know from experience that even though I didn't change some particular module, a change elsewhere can propagate in unexpected ways and influence an unchanged module.

I think it would be useful to comb the current and previous versions of TB to see the specific changes.  How can we do that?

Comment 5

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

You can always look at the bug fixed in the release, which will give every change made. but I would just trust Mark and wait for Apple, as this does sound like their issue. (Possible it could be an extension if you have one, but not likely). You can always create a new profile, and try importing a few e-mails from it, that would let us know.