575038 - Inbox periodically gets corrupted

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Penelope Graveyard :: Mail Window, defect)

Description

[Orin Wells]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Build Identifier: Eudora 8.0b8

I have had this happen five times now over the past several months.  The contents of the inbox first appear to get corrupted by showing the correct mail header information in the summary table/window (From, Date, Subject etc.) but older emails when highlighted will show information from the last email opened (or previewed)but ONLY the header information.  The body is totally missing.  Re-inexing completes the corruption with all affected messages disappearing.
My guess is this is caused by one or more of the following (possibly in conjunction with each other).
Deleting a message from the inbox as new mail is being received.
Deleting a message as indexing is in progress
A secondary Inbox window being open (automatically by Eudora for whatever reason)as new email is received and(?) indexing of the inbox in progress? 

What I know it is not is "too many" messages in the inbox or a limit of any sort on space etc.  I had it happen with over 2,000 messages and with about 300 messages.

Copying the messages to another folder and re-indexing there ends up with the same result as in the inbox itself.  This is quite a painful experience.  But I understand you may not have enough to reproduce this.  I have tried to force it to no avail so far.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. I remain uncertain of the exact steps.  But I am confident it happens during reading of new messages.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Orin Wells]

Update - July 11th, 2010.  I had it happen again.  

The inbox contained 384 messages (more or less).  There were several dozen messages from two different mailing lists.  I sorted the inbox on subject, highlighted a set of email messages from one of the lists, selected "transfer" to move it to another folder I have set up for these messages once I determine I no longer am interested in them being in the Inbox.  The transfer was initiated.  I scrolled up the list to seek the second set of items to transfer before the first was completed.  I don't believe I did anything before the first transfer was complete.  

I then highlighted the second set and transferred them.  ONLY 4 of the second set ended up in the secondary folder BUT only the headers made it over.  No body text.  The headers were correct.  

Meanwhile back in the inbox I noticed the currently highlighted message reflected the first message in the first set selected to be transferred although the inbox catalog reflected a totally different message.  EVERY message reflected in the Inbox catalog showed EXACTLY the same wrong headder.  The inbox had been totally cleaned out.  Looking at the physical file size it had collapsed to under 64KB.  When I re-indexed, the inbox was totally gone.

My hunch now is that this takes place when transferring a quantity of messages from the inbox to another folder.  Normally this seems to work.  So is it a problem of highlighting a second set of messages and selecting for transfer before the indexes have been updated following a previous transfer??

Comment 2

[Orin Wells]

2nd Update.  August 13th.  I have had the corruption happen twice in the last two weeks since my last update.  I am still not certain what the combination is that triggers this.  The problem for nailing the trigger is I don't see the impact until many hours later when I see older messages no longer linking properly.  I have the latest update (8b9) so it didn't accidentally get fixed on an update.  I am running Window 2000 Pro.  I doubt that is the issue.  I know that on at least some occasions when this happens I have FireFox running also.  I would be surprised if there is an interaction.  I still suspect there may be a trigger caused by my either prematurely selecting one or more items in the inbox to delete OR that I am viewing one of the incoming messages - one or the other while messages are still being fetched from the server or, maybe, the inbox is re-indexing.  I have 14 email boxes I check on manual "get new messages".  It is awfully frustrating as any attempt at recovery is not pretty.

Comment 3

[lester]

Apologies for not taking the time to point you to my lugubrious story in the Thunderbird bug lists, or to give you a keystroke-level soluton.  Essentially, I have avoided this problem since I eliminated automatic compaction.  To compact mailboxes, I go offline and then file / compact folders.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

there is a thunderbird bug or two that describes this - I believe the most likely suspect is the bug involving cache

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

I can't tell if these are imap folders, or local folders with messages downloaded via pop3...

Comment 6

[lester]

in my case, pop3

Comment 7

[justinclose]

   I have noticed somewhat similar issues with the inbox index getting out of whack over the past one or two months.  I don't have particulars of a cause, nor have I filed a bug yet...was going to do that when I found yours here.  :)
   My issues are multiple.  They are all present when viewing 'Unified' folders, but some of them still exist when viewing separate folders.
   *  'new' messages that don't show up in the inbox list (the 'from/to/subject' etc. view of headers in the right side pane), but do in the tooltip hovering over the inbox folder in the left pane (e.g. "Message XYZ" shows in tooltip, but not in the right pane).  I also get the popup saying that I have received a message.  This can happen from either a POP or IMAP account.
   *  Deleting messages from one particular account (a Gmail IMAP interface) causes the bottom message to disappear from the preview list in the right pane, but leave the message that was deleted visible.  It doesn't matter what kind of message was at the bottom (e.g. POP or IMAP, what account it was from, etc).  Clicking the message header that was supposed to be deleted shows the message content of that message, i.e. it is still showing the correct message body.  (This is the one that happens even when viewing in separate folders.)
   *  I thought I had a few other issues, but not recalling them at the moment.  Oh well, this isn't exactly an official bug post!  :)

All of these problems can be rectified by clicking on a different folder and then back to the Inbox.  Happens on TB 8 and now verified on 9 beta.

-- Justin

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120428 Thunderbird/12.0.1
on Windows XP 32

Something like this just killed about a week's messages from my "bugzilla" subfolder of Pop3 inbox - that folder has more than 9000 messages, but 98% of these are plaintext messages from bmo, so the total size of that file is only 70MB, and message structure is mostly simple (no attachments or other multipart complexities).

STR (first and only time this happened)
- read subfolder of pop3 inbox where bmo messages get filtered into on arrival
- that folder is sorted by newest first
- display one of today's messages (correctly)
- switched to threaded mode (msg still displayed correctly, I think)
- moved down to a another msg in same thread (and I suppose that message is also in the week's range that has now disappeared without trace)
- see symptoms of disturbance: blank message bodies, truncated messages bodies etc.
- Repair folder -> after that, one week of messages including the "broken" ones physically gone from that folder
- I checked the source file of that folder and there is a physical truncation near the bottom of the file which actually whiped out these messages, with a couple of the most recent messages at the very end of the file unaffected.

SCARY!

Comment 9

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Penelope didn't see any activity in the vcs for the last 8 years, closing.