58519 - Mail Window displays a different message body that doesn't match selected message header

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Seeing this on WinNT 4.0 SP4 with both 10/25 and 10/30 N6 Commercial builds.

What happens: after using Mail for a while and reading and deleting messages,
you delete a message. The next message is automatically selected, but the body
of a different message (generally from a different folder than the folder of the
currently selected message) appears in the message body area.

Restarting the browser seems to be a workaround.

Note: I also notice that about the same time as this happens, the mail window
frequently gets into a state where even though you click a message's header, the
message body is blank, and if you double click the header, a blank window opens.
I think these two bugs may be related; filing that other one separately.

No reliable way to reproduce this, but it's happening frequently in 10/25 and
10/30 Commercial builds, so filing to put on radar.

Comment 1

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

cc:ing kmurray for severity and possible rtm assessment. Marking regression as
this didn't happen in previous builds.

Comment 2

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Bug 58520 is the possibly-related "Mail message body area displays as blank; if
double click header, blank window opens."

Comment 3

[Keith Spainhour]

I am seeing something similar to this on Solaris nightlies.  After a while,
you can click on a mail header and it does not update the message area.

Comment 4

[scottputterman]

reassigning to sspitzer.  There are a few other bugs out there about getting in
a state where you can no longer read messages.  They seem to include doing
things like deleting a message while it's in the process of loading.

Comment 5

[Torsten Scheck]

Win952; Mozilla 0.92 

I have a folder to archive special messages. 
Every day I move some mails from the inbox to this
folder, which is containing hundreds of messages now.
With this folder the chosen message in the header list
doesn't correspond to the shown message body. When I 
doubleclick the header the same wrong body is opened.

That's very annoying as I can't use the header list to
search for specific mails. In this case I open the mbox-file
with my favourite ASCII-viewer and do a regex search.

Comment 6

[Cleber S. Mori]

PC - Linux Slack 8.0 running Build ID: 2001080104 Mozilla 0.9.3

I filter my messages from lists into separete folders.
When I select a message in 'folder contents' pane, the message pane shows me the
wrong message. It allways shows another message in the same folder. I see no
relation between the two messages, the selected and the shown one.

It seems to happend only on folders that have messages from different senders,
that is, not all the messages are from the same person.

In my case, neither restarting mozilla or the O.S. brings the right results back.

The confusion is on the mail program, beacuse the files that contains mail
messages are "intact".

Comment 7

[Susie Wyshak]

I experienced this for the first time today using Win 2000 Gecko/20010726
Netscape6/6.1. I changed the severity to CRITICAL as the messages appear to be
permanently corrupted.

Example: One message received in HTML matched the header. That same message body
appeared as text as the body of several other messages.

One Bugscape bug message body came through as:
BAPTISMS - You can say "WELCOME TO THE WORLD!!!!
 (divine intervention?)

Comment 8

[kmurray1115]

I see this when we start to leak. As ekrock stated when this was filed, you have
to use mail foir w while to experience this, but it seems to rectify itself if
you restart.
Esther, do we have any tests in place to see what happens to mail display after
a certain amount of run time?

Comment 9

[Susie Wyshak]

After not using N6.1 mail for a couple of weeks I downloaded 29 messages today. 
-17 of these had the incorrectly paired message body and header. 
-12 had completely blank bodies. 

The same messages downloaded fine in N4.7. I can provide a copy of my 6.1 mail
to QA if it would help.

Comment 10

[kmurray1115]

Another point for consideration:
I belive the way we load messages needs to be reviewed. On a slow connection the
following manifests itself more frequently:
I.   Launch Mail in 3 pane
II.  Make sure you have a message displayed in the message pane
III. Single click on a different message to display the body in the message pane
IV.  Note the order in which we change the message display:
     1. Message Header changes to reflect new header info
     2. While new message body loads, message body from previous message still
present in message pane
     3. When new message body finishes loading, it replaces contents of 'old'
message body with new contents

We are probably getting horked somewhere in the middle of this process, and
susiew might be seeing a freeze frame of this after some corruption occurs. 

We should definitely consider using the method employed by 4.x at the very
least, in that, before we attempt to load the new message body, we should clear
the contents of the old message display.

Comment 11

[Susie Wyshak]

Other observations:
1) When these problems began occuring, I no longer see message headers - whether
All or Normal is selected. Just "Subject:" but no data

2) Messages I receive one at a time during the day while mail is open look FINE.
It's only when I've downloaded several at a time after mail has been closed
where the header/body gets mixed up.

3) I see no pattern in which headers and bodies are combined. It has nothing to
do with if I've read the message whose body appears in the current message I'm
viewing, and there is no predictable sequence of which body and header is combined.

Comment 12

[Scott MacGregor]

>We should definitely consider using the method employed by 4.x at the very
>least, in that, before we attempt to load the new message body, we should clear
>the contents of the old message display.

Kevin we used to do that in 6.x and it had a dramatic impact on message loading
speed. So I took it out. It was one of our biggest wins performance wise in 6.0
for message display speed. 

Minusing for eMojo. Not a stopper.

Comment 13

[Petr Ruzicka]

I have the very same problem in my configuration. From version 0.9.4 I use mail 
client and I filter mails from various conferences to underlying folders. It 
happens two or three time per day tha mail header has different body in 
preview. Even when I open mail it is the same as the one in preview. It looks 
like mail body related to mail header dissapeared for ever. Restart of mail 
client does not solve this issue.
I have similar problem with 0.9.5 and the same with yesterdays 0.9.6. I have 
Win98, now Mozzila 0.9.6, always intalling ovr old configuration. For me it is 
important issue as I lost several important emails in this way. I could only 
see its header...

Comment 14

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Bugs targeted at mozilla1.0 without the mozilla1.0 keyword moved to mozilla1.0.1 
(you can query for this string to delete spam or retrieve the list of bugs I've 
moved)

Comment 15

[Håkan Waara]

Petr, do you mind trying to reproduce this in a nightly build (you can download 
it from mozilla.org's frontpage), and reporting back here?  Maybe this bug is 
not valid anymore.

Comment 16

[Petr Ruzicka]

Actually, I have 0.97 now but I install it from scratch. I did not see the same
behaviour again, so IMHO, this bug is not valid anymore, at least for me.

Comment 17

[Jody Fanning]

This has been happening to me since about Mozilla 0.9.5. It is still happening
with 0.9.7 and if anything is getting worse. Compacting the folder seems to fix
it sometimes, but it isn't making any difference at the moment.

This is on Win2000 SP2 with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US;
rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011221.

Always install to a clean directory from the Zip archive, but reuse the same
mail files with each version.

Incoming mail sorted using filters and it seems to affect all the folders where
the sorted mail goes as well as the inbox.

Comment 18

[Jaime Rodriguez, Jr.]

i'm a bit confused, because this one is marked as nsbeta1, P2/Critical and a
regression, but is targetted for M1.0.1.

Comment 19

[Peter Trudelle]

nsbeta1- per ADT triage, ->1.2, blocks 'miracle bug' 122274

Comment 20

[Jaime Rodriguez, Jr.]

I wonder if this is related to what msanz and evelyn are seeing in 3 pane ...
hmmmmmm. renominating to be re-evaluated.

Comment 21

[jglick]

Related to 107466.

Comment 22

[scottputterman]

marking nsbeta1- per mail triage.

Comment 23

[Jhe]

I got the same kind of problem using Moz 1.2b (WinNT 4.0sp5). Messages were
retrived using POP. Mail client displays message body that does not match
message header.
The body was the body of a mail received previously, then the few messages get
with POP after this one will show correct sender/ subject in the mail list, but
with the incorrect body. If I try a "save as file", the result is the hole
invalid message.
Even after mozilla / system restart, the problem stays the same. By the way,
I've lost permanently 5 or 6 emails due to this problem.

Comment 24

[Matthew Robinson]

I have been using all releases since 1.0, I only strated to get this problem
with 1.2a, and 1.2b and 1.2. I use imap mail, and as well as losing the body of
a message, i also see message corruption, lots of junk in message text. Symptoms
are:

1.   blank messahe body
2.   junk in message body
3.   message header and message body are from 2 different messages

I close Mozilla and use N4.79 and everything works fin, including "broken" message 

Comment 25

[Falkenberg]

I use IMAP, and, as a temporary workaround, whenever this bug occurs, I move all
my mail from the INBOX to another folder and then back to the INBOX. After this,
headers and body do match again. Unfortunately, I have to this a couple of times
per week lately, so I hope this bug can be fixed quickly.

Comment 26

[Scott Davis]

This bug suddenly popped up for me on Thunderbird 0.5 using IMAP (offline
extension installed). I hadn't seen the bug before on previous versions, but now
it happens several times a day. Restarting the browser DOES NOT fix the problem.
Deleting the INBOX file on disk fixes the problem.

Comment 27

[Worcester12345]

Filed Bug 292101 recently. Looks like similar to this one.

Comment 28

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

1.7.8 is gone

Comment 29

[Worcester12345]

No blocking and no target milestone on what looks like a (keyword missing)
DATALOSS bug? 

Comment 30

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

gone for you with 1.1 or alpha 2??

 http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/2.0a2

Comment 31

[Philip Chee]

No reply to comment #30. Closing.