478162 - gloda conversation invariant can be violated by non-sequentially indexed messages with truncated references lists

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Error messages like the following can be observed when indexing messages with truncated references lists:
Inconsistency in conversations invariant on BLAH.  It has conv id FOO but expected BAR. ID: BAZ

The root cause is a message sent by a jerky e-mail client that only indicates the message that it is immediately in reply to.  (If it indicates no messages, we don't bin it in a conversation and there is no problem).  This is not a problem when we see/index the messages in the order in which the replies were made.  But if the messages were delivered out-of-order or we simply index them out of order (this can be due to the messages living in different folders, autosync processing order, etc.), we end up having problems.

This was not originally dealt with because of complexity issues and concern over giving the ability to malicious messages to cause a message to be re-parented to a conversation it does not actually belong to.

This problem can be addressed without introducing new malicious message vulnerabilities by allowing the known-missing apparent root message to re-parent its descendants to a new conversation when the message shows up.

Comment 1

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Not blocking, but this should either be resolved or stop producing output on the error console.