518891 - detach/delete attachment does neither: results in duplicate email w/attachment

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1089452

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009090216 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.14
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090915 Lightning/1.0pre Thunderbird/3.0b4

Attempting to detach or delete an attachment doesn't give the expected effect.  Instead, it results in duplicate email/attachments.

Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Highlight attachment file name at bottom of message
2. Right-click & select Detach
3. Receive 'warning' about permanent change (forget exact phrase)
4. Click OK
5. Status bar at bottom reads "Moved 1 message from Inbox to Inbox" 
Actual Results:  
At this point, nothing has been erased.  In fact, I can loop the process: do it again and generate the same message.  The status bar at bottom will read "Moved 2 messages from Inbox to Inbox."

The inbox will only show 1 message though.

If I leave the inbox (say, go to an nntp session or calendar and come back to inbox, I'll now have an exact duplicate of the message and attachment in the inbox (or 2, depending on how many times I've tried detaching). Except now, when I go through the paces, the duplicates & originals will behave properly (i.e. detachments & deletes work). 

Expected Results:  
successful detachment or deletion of attachment

Bug 516952 seems to be close to what I experienced.  This was happening during a single session.  Next day (today), no problems.  Detaching & Deleting w/o problem.  Sorry, wish I could be of more help.

Comment 1

[Keith Dear]

I also have this. An email has two attachments that I can't get rid of.

OPERATIONS THAT CAUSED THE PROBLEM
I detached one, and while the revised message was still downloading I detached the other. This did not give rise to any warning or error message.

RESULT
The two attachments did appear on disk ok (word docs, which opened with no problem) but were not detached from the message even though I clicked "OK" to the confirm message "This action connot be undone. Do you wish to continue".

From here on nothing I do removes them from the message, which remains large-ish (3546kb). I can re-detach them (new copies appear on disk) and even delete them, but they are still there in the message, unchanged size. I have tried detaching/delete each separately and also using detach/delete all. Again, no error messages, the operation APPEARS to go ok, but the original message remains unchanged with the attachments still there.

SUGGESTION
Attachment handling seems generally to be seriously screwed up in Tb. It needs its own bug report chapter. It also needs a total redesign and rewrite, being at present the software equivalent of a decayed worm-ridden cheesy hairball.

Comment 2

[Rick O'Gorman]

This problem seems to be when attempting to delete an attachment in the Smart Inbox. I have had it happen several times. When I switched to the actual relevant account inbox, I found that I could successfully delete the attachment from the email.

Comment 3

[John P Baker]

Confirming behaviour in comment #0

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227 Thunderbird/3.0.3

Comment 4

[John P Baker]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Confirming behaviour in comment #0
> 
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227
> Thunderbird/3.0.3

In fact I am also confirming comment #2 ! It is only a problem for me in the Smart Inbox.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

craigo, Keith, Rick, is your problem also *only* when using unified (aka smart) folder?

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

No - I can reproduce this either via unified or single-account folders.  FYI, I'm now running TBird 11.01 over Ubuntu 12.04

Comment 7

[Moritz Franckenstein]

I have this reproducible since years in all virtual folders: when I try to delete an attachment, the status bar displays "moved 1 message from inbox to inbox", but nothing seems to happen in the open virtual folder. When I go to the real folder, the email now exists twice, one with attachment and one with deleted attachment. In real folders it works like expected.

Windows x86 with Thunderbird 17.0.5, please update version...

Comment 8

[Moritz Franckenstein]

P.S.: the "nothing seems to happen" might be because this particular virtual folder displays only emails > 500kb. That will be the reason why the created duplicate isn't visible there.

Comment 9

[Arnaud Lesauvage]

I confirm the behavior in Comment #7
A real pity, since Smart Folders with a message size criteria are very useful to clean up a large IMAP account.
i.e. I setup a Smart Folder to display all messages with a size over 1000 kB, use it to remove a lot of attachments, and end up with all my attachments still there and a lot of duplicates...

Comment 10

[Arnaud Lesauvage]

Sorry for double posting, but this bug affects TB 17.5 on Windows, it is therefore platform independent and affects all versions above at least TB 11.0 (it is marked ver TB11 on x86 Linux).

Comment 11

[[e-mail]]

updating to include all platforms. Can't find way to indicate ver 11 *and* above

Comment 12

[Anders Eriksson]

I can confirm this on OS X 10.8.5, 10.10.x, 10.11.x with all Thunderbird versions for the last couple of years, including 38.x.

Comment 13

[Lars Rohwedder]

I could reproduce it on Debian's Icedove 31.8.0.

My self-compiled TB does it as expected: Leave one mail in the inbox, with two deleted attachments in it.

Comment 14

[Lars Rohwedder]

When the GUI is a bit slowed down by working via remote SSH I saw that for a very small moment TB shows 2 mails in the inbox. But one of them disappears quickly and the remaining one is the one with "deleted attachments" ("Detach" is disabled in the menu and the attachment is marked as "You deleted an attachment from this message…")

Comment 15

[Lars Rohwedder]

If I add a 2nd e-mail account into my self-compiled TB the bug appears as described by craigo. So only a "unified inbox" with only 1 account works, with >1 accounts the bug appears.

Comment 16

[jwq]

Bug 1089452 contains significant discussion on what appears to be exactly the same issue with detach/delete attachments from a virtual folder in IMAP accounts. Although this bug was filed 5 years earlier, it might be optimal to mark this bug as a duplicate of Bug 1089452?

Comment 17

[Lars Rohwedder]

:fallen and I investigated this bug together:

* it worked on local folder (e.g. the Trash folder)
* nsDelAttachListener::OnStopRunningUrl() is called before nsDelAttachListener::OnStopCopy(). OnStopCopy() sets m_state = eUpdatingFolder. OnStopRunningUrl() expects that value to delete the original message. So the original message is never deleted.
* in OnStopRunningUrl() the m_state is eCopyingNewMessage, so the if() condition is not fulfilled and DeleteOriginalMessage() is not called.

https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/base/src/nsMessenger.cpp#2701

:jcranmer, do you have an idea what went wrong?