555214 - After automatic "upgrade", ALL messages deleted. account retention policy was changed to delete messages more than 30 days old, and ALWAYS DELETE READ MESSAGES [pop]

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Ronald Roth]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100202 Firefox/3.5.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.24 (20100228)

After an automatic upgrade, I found that my inbox (which typically contains anywhere from 30 to 50 messages) contained only a few messages.  On investigation, I found that ALL of my folders in my Archives were missing messages.  After some more investigation, I found that the retention policy for my email account had somehow been set to delete messages more than 30 days old, AND to ALWAYS DELETE READ MESSAGES.  I have NEVER selected either of those options - I always had it set to "Don't delete any messages.".

I lost more than a decade of mail because of this bug.  This is devastating.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Use Thunderbird.
2.  Automatic upgrade occurs.
3.  Check inbox, realize messages are missing.
4.  Freak out and wonder how this could be allowed to happen.
Actual Results:  
Lost ALL of my mail, except what was sent in the last couple of days AND has not yet been read.

Expected Results:  
Stop deleting my mail when I don't ask you to.
Don't update my preferences unless I tell you to.

IMAP account.
All messages are stored on the server.  I do not keep local copies (I often switch computers).  I first noticed this after an upgrade on my windows XP machine.  I don't know if this would have happened if the upgrade had first occured on my linux machine, since, after all, I only have one set of mail for Thunderbird to arbitrarily delete.

I searched for other bugs that are similar, and the closest I found was 515037.  However, this bug and other bugs like it all talk about changing the retention policy on one folder, and then experiecing data loss because that policy leaked to other folders.  This is different because I CHANGED NOTHING. 

Email me with questions.  I'll respond if TB doesn't delete the message as soon as I read it.

Comment 1

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

This looks something like bug 356535. I don't really know how to determine this for sure, though, as I've never seen this behavior myself. (You may also be interested in e.g. bug 323160.)

Also, I'd like to express my sympathy -- this is not a pleasant issue to run into at all, and should be killed ASAP.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ronald, have you ever experienced this again?

Comment 3

[Ronald Roth]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Ronald, have you ever experienced this again?

No, thank goodness. This would be impossible to tolerate twice - I would immediately switch mail clients if this happened again.

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED WORKSFORME per comment 3.