484445 - IMAP messages marked as deleted get removed when they should not be

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Matt Dudziak]

The problem is that if you have Thunderbird set for 'When I delete a message: -> Just mark it as deleted' messages get deleted anyway. The mailbox is compacted and the messages marked as deleted are expunged. This happens in all IMAP mailboxes and happens when 'Clean up ("Expunge") Inbox on Exit' is unchecked (or checked).

To reproduce:
- Set up a test IMAP account and set the option for 'When I delete a message:' to 'Just mark it as deleted'
- Put 500 or so messages in the Inbox for this account (and also test another non-Inbox mailbox if you like; the result will be the same)
- Select all the messages
- Press delete
- Note all messages are marked as deleted
- Select another mailbox
- Select the Inbox (or your test mailbox) again
- Note all the messages get deleted completely from mailbox. This is the bug.
(Note you may need to quit/restart Thunderbird for the message to be deleted)

Set mail.imap.expunge_threshold_number to a high number, like 2000 and repeat above tests and note that the 500 messages you mark ad deleted do NOT get expunged. 

mail.imap.expunge_threshold_number defaults to 20 which is a pretty small number. Perhaps it should default to a larger number? Also, at a minimum, the wording in the settings needs to be fixed so that the user knows the messages will get completely deleted when the mail.imap.expunge_threshold_number threshold is met. Ideally the messages would never automatically get expunged as that is what the wording of the option in the settings implies.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Do you have some other expunge pref/s set too? 
I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen with the default thunderbird settings, or I'd see it all the time.

Comment 2

[Dale Wiggins]

Attachment: Fix for typo-type error.

This was a typo-type error (introduced while unbitrotting patch for Bug 359284) that caused the gExpungeOption variable to be ignored.

Comment 3

[Jeff Beckley]

Note that this is a pretty serious bug.  It causes messages to get expunged (permanently removed from the IMAP server) even when the user has auto-expunge turned off.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 370683 [details] [diff] [review]
Fix for typo-type error.

this looks right - small nit, no need to indent the second line of the comment here:

+        // Don't do expunge when we are lite selecting folder because we
+	     // could be doing undo.

I'll try to run with this patch - I wonder why people using the imap delete model aren't complaining...

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

fix checked in, with tab removed. Thx for fixing this, Dale.

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

I verified that this bug does happen w/o the patch, and is fixed by the patch.

Comment 8

[rsx11m]

Since this was checked in, I've noticed that in the "Remove immediately"
setting an "Expunge" is sent when starting up Thunderbird on the first
connection (the status bar shows "Compacting..."), even though no message is marked as deleted. This behavior is not observed for the "Mark as deleted"
model. Is this the intended behavior? If not, I'll file this as regression.