471399 - Continuously adding "important" tag in absolutely random manner

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Penelope Graveyard :: Mail Window, defect)

Description

[holepallerotte]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.1)
Build Identifier: Eudora 8.0.0b4

Hallo,
I recently installed Eudora 8 beta, imported correctly all messages from old Eudora version. Started using the program, initially very well, then I started tagging some mails in local folders mailboxes. No matter which tag I apply, closing and reopening the mailbox, on some messages, normally the first let's say 15 from the top of my sorting, an uncommanded "important" tag is added. There is no logic at all, the criteria seems to be absolutely random, no particular sender, e-mail client, used protocol. I tried the following, with no result: deleted all default tags, including "important" of course; cancelling the relevant .msf file (as soon as it is recreated, the undesired tag immediatly reappears on all the relevant messages).
The problem is very annoying, please give me a solution. Sorry if all this is already covered, I searched for long, but I didn't find. 
Best regards

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Exit Eudora
2.Del XX mailbox .msf file
3.Open XX mailbox. Some mails should be tagged "important"
Actual Results:  
Some mails get tagged "important".

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Moving to Penelope component in the first instance. This could be a Thunderbird bug, but I don't know what patches they have applied to Thunderbird.

Comment 2

[Matt Dudziak]

I have no idea how this could be happening. Do you have any filters set up to assign tags? Do you have any other extensions installed?

Thanks, Matt

Comment 3

[holepallerotte]

Thanks for your reply Matt.
No, I have no filters set up to assign tags.
The only extra extension I installed is an italian dictionary.
In the mean while, I noticed this: every now and then, after receiving mail, moving it to other folders, etc, when I set my mouse pointer over a folder to open it, it shows a small white square under the mouse arrow, like meaning something I don't know. THAT is the moment that if I open that mailbox, before opening it, at the bottom, on the task bar (under the preview pane, to be clear),it tells me "refreshing folder list" and immediatly after a good part of my mails in that folder become unwantedly tagged. Hope to be clear enough.
Best regards. 
Dan

Comment 4

[holepallerotte]

Thanks for your reply Matt.
No, I have no filters set up to assign tags.
The only extra extension I installed is an italian dictionary.
In the mean while, I noticed this: every now and then, after receiving mail, moving it to other folders, etc, when I set my mouse pointer over a folder to open it, it shows a small white square under the mouse arrow, like meaning something I don't know. THAT is the moment that if I open that mailbox, before opening it, at the bottom, on the task bar (under the preview pane, to be clear),it tells me "refreshing folder list" and immediatly after a good part of my mails in that folder become unwantedly tagged. Hope to be clear enough.
Best regards. 
Dan

Comment 5

[last.bug.found]

I too have see emails somewhat randomly tagged as 'important'.  In my case it seems to be related to filters moving the messages to another folder.  I had many filters setup in Eudora 7, and most of them seem to work.  This may be related, folders that have random 'important' tags also don't seem to indicate new messages (bold with a count) when filters move the messages.
Regards,
Brian

Comment 6

[Jeff Beckley]

(In reply to comment #1)
> This could be a Thunderbird
> bug, but I don't know what patches they have applied to Thunderbird.

Eudora 8.0b4 is based on the Thunderbird 3.0a3 code base.


(In reply to comment #3)
> In the mean while, I noticed this: every now and then, after receiving mail,
> moving it to other folders, etc, when I set my mouse pointer over a folder to
> open it, it shows a small white square under the mouse arrow, like meaning
> something I don't know.

Sounds like the tooltip on folders that shows up to give a list of the "new" (which are messages that have the orange sun-looking icon next to them in the Subject, which is different from being "unread") messages in a folder, but there are no new messages in that folder and so the list is empty.  Folders without new messages shouldn't have tooltips at all (I don't get them on my setup), so that would be a bug if that's what's happening.


> THAT is the moment that if I open that mailbox, before
> opening it, at the bottom, on the task bar (under the preview pane, to be
> clear),it tells me "refreshing folder list" and immediatly after a good part of
> my mails in that folder become unwantedly tagged. Hope to be clear enough.

Very strange.  Is this IMAP?  I don't know of anything in Eudora/Penelope that would be causing this behavior.  Filters would be my best guess as to the tags being added.  Go through all of your filters (be sure to check the account-specific filters and the Local Folders filters if they are accounts that use the Global Inbox).

Comment 7

[Marc]

I can confirm this bug.

I imported mail, settings and filters from Eudora 7 into beta 5.

Seems to occur randomly.

Please let me know if more data is required.

Comment 8

[Emilio Perea]

I ran into this same problem right after upgrading to beta 4, and is unchanged in beta 5. Most of the time if I drag a message from the inbox to another folder the Important tag is not added, but if I right-click and select move-to, it is.  Sometimes messages I have sent are tagged as personal, but not always.

Messages moved by the filter rules are never tagged, although if I move a single message to a folder, all the messages there are tagged.  E.g. a folder which is populated by a mailing list filter rule is normally tag-free, but when I move the monthly majordomo list reminder message to it, next time I open it all the messages are tagged as important.

When a message is marked as junk and moved to the Junk folder, it might lose the Junk mark and gain the Important tag right away, but (presumably due to the number of messages moved to it manually) it eventually will end up as Important but not Junk.

I don't use tags myself and hoped that deleting all the tags from the Tools/Options/Display/Tags box would stop this nuisance, but it did not.

Comment 9

[Shal Farley]

I ran into this same problem right after installing 8.0.0b5, hadn't seen it in 8.0.0b2 (my prior).

Drag-and-drop a message from, say, Inbox to an arbitrary folder. That message, and often several others in the target folder, get the "Important" tag. I've also seen it when dragging a message from a folder imported from Eudora 7.

Never seems to happen when I'm trying to test it. I only notice later when I open a folder that its messages are lit up like a barber pole. Still working on getting a reproducible sequence.

Maybe or not related: one folder of mine has 9 messages that spontaneously become unread. I haven't correlated that to any particular activity yet.

Other details:

My 8.0.0b2 install of Eudora was "clean" (on a freshly formatted machine with no prior Tbird or Eudora installations). The 8.0.0b5 was on top of that. WinXP Pro. Imported only mailboxes (.mbx and .toc) from Eudora 7 from a backup of my prior machine. Manually added the one registry key necessary to get import to work at all (names the path of the Eudora 7 files to import).

Comment 10

[lester]

I confirm this bug.  Happens on newly downloaded messages; don't kniow whether it also happens on imported, older messages.  Windows XP, beta5.

Comment 11

[lester]

Bug can be reproduced as follows.  Delete an attachment from a message.  This unexpectedly and erroneously sets the "Important" tag on that message.  Windows XP, beta5.

Comment 12

[Jeff Beckley]

I can get problem to reproduce using the steps in comment 11 using Thunderbird 3.0 beta 2 as well.  From other comments in this bug it appears there may be other ways for tags to get "randomly" applied as well.

In any case, this definitely seems to be a base Thunderbird bug, and not specific to Eudora/Penelope.  So changing the Product to TB.

Comment 13

[David :Bienvenu]

Jeff, is this with local folders?

Is there something getting written into the x-mozilla-keys header, if it's a local folder?

Comment 14

[Jeff Beckley]

It is a local folder, but there's nothing getting written to X-Mozilla-Keys:.  It's just spaces in that header, both in the original version of the message before the detach and in the newly written message after the detach.

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

perhaps related to bug 440366, bug 416284. bug 329145 also is fallout from deleting attachment

Comment 16

[Jeff Beckley]

So I've tracked it down to the X-Mozilla-Status2: header.  I have a number of messages that inside the X-Mozilla-Status2: header specify a label, but the tag in the msgHdr is empty.  They show as though the message has no tag assigned.  However, if the message gets rewritten (which happens if you delete an attachment from the message), then the message will get the label in the X-Mozilla-Status2: header converted to a tag which is displayed.  This happens in nsParseMailMessageState::FinalizeHeaders(), around line 1352 of mailnews/local/src/nsParseMailbox.cpp.

Many (but not all) of the messages that I have that contain this X-Mozilla-Status2: header with a label were imported from Classic Eudora.  However, I can't get this to repeat now by importing messages.  When importing they all get X-Mozilla-Status2: headers of all zeroes.  Even if I run older versions the import won't repeat the behavior.

Comment 10 indicates that it can happen on newly received messages, so it's not just imported messages from Classic Eudora.

I'm not sure what is causing the X-Mozilla-Status2: header to get the label values.

Comment 17

[Jeff Beckley]

Further debugging lead me to find out that the X-Mozilla-Status2: header gets this extra label value when the mailbox is compacted.  By default Eudora does compaction automatically whereas Thunderbird doesn't, so this would be why users would be more likely to see this bug in Eudora than Thunderbird.

Still can't seem to come up with a reliable set of reproducible steps, though.

Comment 18

[David :Bienvenu]

prior to the tag work in tb 2.0, we just had labels, and labels were stored as flags in x-mozilla-status2, and for backwards compatibility, we still get the labels from there.

compaction shouldn't be touching the x-mozilla-status2 header unless it has to add the header, I think. 

I don't remember if we write out the 5 standard tags as labels in x-mozilla-status2 header for backwards compatibility or not.

Comment 19

[Jeff Beckley]

My guess is that somehow the flags are getting corrupted in the msgHdr (where/how is still the big unknown), and that gets written to the mailbox file during compaction.  This happens at <http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/base/src/nsMsgFolderCompactor.cpp#703>.

Should there really be any reason for current code to ever *set* the label?  Based on your comments, it seems that labels should only be read for backwards compatibility.

Comment 20

[Jeff Beckley]

So it turns out that the original source to this bug is actually Eudora (so moving it back to Penelope, sorry for the bugspam).  It was introduced in a new feature that changes core code which hasn't been submitted yet in to TB: see bug 359270.

It turns out the flags we used for MSG_VIEW_FLAG_ISSENT_SET and MSG_VIEW_FLAG_ISSENTBYME overlap in the message flags with ones used for the pre-TB2 version of tags called labels.  They were 8 different colors (well, 7 plus none), that you could only apply one of, that got encoded in to 3 bits in the message flags.  Those two ISSENT flags are in the same spot as the lowest two bits of the label encoding.

Whenever a message on disk has to be reparsed (which happens if the message is rewritten when deleting an attachment, or when the .msf file is missing or corrupt), then TB code will to try interpret those bits as a label and will convert that label to a tag.  This is how the tags seems to "randomly" appear on messages.

The fix is to move the ISSENT flags to a different spot in the general message flags.  That fix will find its way in to bug 359270.

Comment 21

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Penelope didn't see any activity in the vcs for the last 8 years, closing.