512164 - Unable to properly connect should not remove all IMAP files and folders

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Age Bosma]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Thunderbird/3.0b3

This happens in Thunderbird 3 but just as well in 2.0.0.23.

When you've got a poor IMAP connection (using Gmail e.g.) Thunderbird comes up with errors and notifications like 'The current command did not succees. The mail server repsonded: System error (Failure)'.
Every so often, not always, not reproducible on command, Thunderbird throws away all folders, or messages in a folder.
This should not happen, no proper connection to an IMAP server is not a reason to get rid of the lot. If it can't connect you still should be able to read the messages you already downloaded earlier.

Besides not being able to read the messages when Thunderbird throws away the lot is one thing, the other problem is that you have to go by each folder one by one again (once the list of folder is back) to check the option to check for new messages.

Reproducible: Sometimes




Let me know if you need any more details.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Are you sure you see it with thunderbird3 betas? Should have been bug 213827.

Comment 2

[Age Bosma]

Yes, this happens in TB3 as well. I kept getting the issue in TB2 so I installed TB3 to check if it was fixed. When the issue occurred again in TB3 I filed this bug report.

Gmail finally fixed their problems for me again so it didn't occur in the past two days and I hope it won't happen again soon. I realize this makes it difficult to trace the issue.

I can't recall having seen the issue occur when TB was already up and running (after several connection errors), only directly after launching the program. It gives you something in the lines of a 'Loading folders' status in the status bar at the bottom, followed by removing all the folders. TB3 even gave me a 'removing folders' or 'removing messages' status when this happens. You shouldn't show people such a message when it is not actually deleting messages from the server, safes some heart attacks ;-)

Comment 3

[Age Bosma]

Ah, I just noticed bug 213827 was fixed in August, I'm using Beta 3 which was released in July. You can close this bug if the fix is indeed not included in Beta 3. Big chance it is fixed by now then. If the server starts having problems again I'll update to the latest nightly and test if it was actually fixed.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

August of 2008, so b3 has the relevant fixes in this area.

The issue must be that the gMail error doesn't propagate to the imap protocol code, and thence to the mailnews backend. I don't think this is due to faulty network connections; something is happening on the server side in order for you to see system error responses from the imap server. Without an imap protocol log, I can't tell what's going on here for sure, but I can look at the code again...

Comment 5

[Age Bosma]

Is there a way for me to generate an IMAP protocol log?

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

well, yes, but I thought you couldn't reproduce this anymore. If you can reproduce it, a log would be extremely helpful, thx!

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging

Comment 7

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #0)
> The current command did not succees. The mail server repsonded: System error (Failure)'.

FYI.
I can say nothing about what really happened in your environment.
But I know an example of IMAP log of the error message from Gmail IMAP server.
Gmail IMAP returns this error message at least when Gmail's IMAP server is in maintenance. See Bug 423354 Comment #8 for IMAP log in such situation. Read some comments following it, please.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

please reopen with log when you can reproduce. You should be able to turn logging on, and leave it on without causing performance problems