486586 - Thunderbird spontaneously compacts INBOX

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 484445

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Saul Tannenbaum]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090305 Firefox/3.1b3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090401 Lightning/1.0pre Shredder/3.0b3pre

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090401 Lightning/1.0pre Shredder/3.0b3pre

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Do nothing.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
INBOX compacts, with notice on the status bar and in the activity window.

Expected Results:  
Nothing.

In recent nightly builds, I've noticed that Thunderbird will sometimes spontaneously start a compaction operation on the INBOX (Note: I'm using the IMAP delete model, mark for delete, followed by expunge). This action is reflected in the status bar as well as the activity window.

To the best of my knowledge, I've done nothing to trigger this. I believe it may happen some of the times when I'm doing something else, which is to say, Thunderbird is idle and probably doesn't have application focus.

I know this is a horrible bug report ("Do nothing. Then, sometimes, perhaps after undefined events, something happens") but it reflects my experience. If there's anything I can do to track this down, please reply. And in the spirit of bugday, what component should this have been filed under?

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Which action of "compaction operation" is invoked spontaneously?
(A) expunge command to server? (B) compaction of offline store file? Or (C) set of (A) & (B)?
If (A), at least Bug 484445 exists.
If (B), phenomenon reported to Bug 467305 Comment #2 can occur on Tb trunk.
Sorry but I have no experience of notification of "compaction operation" in activity manager yet. (I use Tb trunk 2009/3/31 build these days)
I saw only "confirmation dialog before auto-compact of local mail folder" in my use of Mozilla family since Mozilla M17.

(Note: I'm using the IMAP delete model, mark for delete, followed by expunge)
Do you mean "Remove it immediately" in UI?
Or "Remove it immediately"   + other setting for auto-expunge or threshold=1?
Or "Just Mark as it deleted" + other setting for auto-expunge or threshold=1?

AFAIK, threshold value is saved in next settings.
> mail.imap.expunge_threshold_number = 20
Probably no threshold value which relates to total file size of offline store.

I don't know corresponding prefs.js entries to auto-compact related setting in "Syncing & Disk Space". (already improved by Bug 410597)

Expunge just after each delete is controlled by next option.
> mail.imap.expunge_after_delete=false
But, AFAIR, Tb's behaviour depends on delete model or some other options, and bug for it is already opened.

Comment 2

[Saul Tannenbaum]

Thanks for the pointer to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=484445 . 
I missed it when searching before I posted my bug.

That looks like exactly what as I was seeing, so I'll mark this as a dupe.