608520 - RSS feed items duplicate at each mail check - applies to all RSS accounts

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 258465

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Barry Jackson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686 on x86_64; rv:2.0b6) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-UK; rv:1.9.2.13pre) Gecko/20101030 Lightning/1.0b2 Lanikai/3.1.7pre

As per the title. This is one of the feeds that shows this behavior:- 
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom/index.rss
This has only started to happen after one of the very recent nightly updates, but I can't be sure which.
Deleting the entries does remove them - but they multiply again like rabbits!

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. You could try adding that feed I quoted
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
RSS entries increase with each re-start or mail check. The one above should have about 30 entries IIRC it now has 4664. No it's now 4692 in just a few minutes!


I have only lightning installed as add-on, no themes.
DE is KDE 4.5.0.

Comment 1

[Barry Jackson]

Further testing in versions going back to TB2 using the same profile in both x86_64 and i586 indicate that this is something in my profile.
I have installed the "remove duplicates" add-on to keep on top of this, but can anyone suggest what may be the problem in the profile?
Everything else is working fine - mail, newsgroups are OK - this is just affecting RSS feeds.
The strange thing is that ALL feeds, even old ones going back months are all re-appearing and breeding like rabbits.
It seems that a block of maybe 10 duplicates of each feed/message (or whatever you call RSS items) are added at each mail check.
For now I will reduce my check frequency.

Comment 3

[Barry Jackson]

I have just spent some time watching this phenomenon.
Whenever new mail is got, one duplicate is added to each item in each account.
There are however a few exceptions - in one account items dated before 28/01/11 do not duplicate, where items as old as 2007 do in other accounts.

If account details or copies of items would help in debugging this I am happy to forward whatever is needed.

I have compacted and also run the folder repair tool on the folders with no change.

Comment 4

[JørgenB]

I have the same problem, using Thunderbird on OSX. I noticed this first time since Thunderbird 6 or something.

Today I found a workaround, which I'd like to share. Maybe it can also aid further debugging. I create a new "Blogs & News feeds" account, and added a new feed entry there, using the exact same feed url as one of the old feeds which where constantly duplicating.  This new entry is NOT duplicating messages, while the old one continues to duplicate.

Comment 5

[alta88]

(In reply to JørgenB from comment #4)
> I have the same problem, using Thunderbird on OSX. I noticed this first time
> since Thunderbird 6 or something.
> 
> Today I found a workaround, which I'd like to share. Maybe it can also aid
> further debugging. I create a new "Blogs & News feeds" account, and added a
> new feed entry there, using the exact same feed url as one of the old feeds
> which where constantly duplicating.  This new entry is NOT duplicating
> messages, while the old one continues to duplicate.

this is probably the smartest thing one can do regarding longtime (pre Tb13 or so) subscriptions.  the large renovation of feeds that started in Tb12 and finished in Tb17 means new subscriptions/processing will not subject the feeds.rdf and feeditems.rdf files to numerous corruptions possible in older Tb versions.

yet these 2 files may contains old remnants.  creating a new account (hence new feeditems.rdf which tracks received messages), and resubscribing from an exported ompl file (which in Tb17 now retains folder structure), will do wonders.  as will deleting feeditems.rdf (although be aware this may cause a 1 time event of dupes of recent messages upon next refresh).

duping this bug back to bug 258465, which should likely be closed as the feeds system in Tb17 is not the same by a long shot.