565216 - Thunderbird occasionally marks all mail in a folder unread

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[William Throwe]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100409 Gentoo IceCat/3.6.3 (like Firefox/3.6.3)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100420 Shredder/3.0.4

Very occasionally, thunderbird will mark everything in one of my folders as unread.  As I use the unread flag to indicate that I need to deal with a message, this causes me to lose all that information.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what causes this or how to reproduce it.  It happens roughly once every few months, to different folders.  It seems to happen shortly after I read mail in the affected folder.

This is an IMAP account.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[William Throwe]

I just noticed that the global indexer reindexed everything in the folder after this happened, so apparently whatever information indicates that the mail was already indexed was also lost.  Maybe this is useful in tracking down the bug.

Comment 2

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

William does it happens in safe-mode ( see https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode for more information) ?

Anything in Tools -> Error console when it happened ?

Comment 3

[William Throwe]

(In reply to comment #2)
> William does it happens in safe-mode ( see
> https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode for more information) ?

As I mentioned above, I can't cause this on demand and it happens only once every few months.  Running thunderbird in safe mode for the next few months to see if this happens does not seem like a viable option.

> Anything in Tools -> Error console when it happened ?

I'll check next time it happens.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

It's also possible your imap server is losing the flag state.  In fact, it sounds pretty likely, because it sounds like the uid validity changed as well, which forces us to redownload headers, and forces gloda to re-index. Do you know what kind of imap server it is?

Comment 5

[William Throwe]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Do you know what kind of imap server it is?

Cyrus 2.1.5 with some patches.

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

I'd look at the server logs to see if it was regenerating the information for the mailbox when this happened. Not that I know how to do that on Cyrus :-)

Comment 7

[William Throwe]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I'd look at the server logs to see if it was regenerating the information for
> the mailbox when this happened. Not that I know how to do that on Cyrus :-)

Unfortunately, I don't run the server.  I'll see if I can interest someone in looking at logs to diagnose this.  For timestamping: the most recent occurance of this was shortly (probably < 15 min) before I filed this bug.

A server problem is good news to me personally, since I'll be switching email providers soon.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

closing invalid on the assumption this is a server bug, as previously mentioned.
If you still see a problem, and imap:5 log may be helpful. https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging