Closed Bug 675868 Opened 14 years ago Closed 14 years ago

Tag weirdness in Imap when offline or on poor connection. occasionally all my tagging gets lost

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Folder and Message Lists
Platform:
x86
macOS
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
critical

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
VERIFIED INVALID

People

(Reporter: mitra_lists, Unassigned)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug)

Details

(Keywords: dataloss, Whiteboard: dovecot bug)

I'm seeing substantial weirdness with Tags when working either Offline or on a bad internet connection (e.g. in an airport). I use tags substantially, tag about 50% of the messages in my inbox, especially when I'm working offline (i.e. its a reminder of what kind of action to take when online). I'm seeing occasions when all my tagging gets lost, but I haven't been able to consistently repeat this. One symptom is that after going online all the new tags disappear from the 3-pane view, and then get reinstated. I think this might be as it updates the inbox, and then applies the tags, this is inconvenient, but not critical as its just the short-term appearance of failure. But in other situations the offline tagging information definately is lost. This seems to be worse when TB is online, but can't rely on the internet connection, it could be a bad connection where requests are timing out. OR it could be a connection that appears online but isn't , for example because its waiting for me to complete a Terms & Conditions click through on a webpage for example. I'll try and find a repeatable case, but it would be good to see confirmation here if someone else is seeing weirness.
Status: NEW → UNCONFIRMED
Ever confirmed: false
Ping - any chance of someone looking at this, it happens a LOT , some emails I've set the tags on a dozen times only to see them disappear at unpredictable random times.
As a further data point, I just watched a bunch of tags that I'd added in this session "wink" out, i.e. one moment they were there, the next they disappeared. I think but can't prove that its something to do with slow updating, i.e. I think that IMAP was doing some kind of update when i changed the tag, and either was very slow, or was interrupted/failed, but for some reason overwrote the local state of the Tag. I'd hate to have to move back to Pop - but might have to :-( that's how bad this bug is if you use Tags to keep a task list.
Mitra how do \Flags behave in the imap log ?
if you can reproduce the issue, I'd suggest turning on IMAP and Offline logging, i.e., IMAP:5, IMAPOFFLINE:5. But if the connection is dropped in the middle of running a url while we think we're online, we won't try to replay a tag change. If the connection fails when we try to start the url, we will rerun the url. And if the operation is done offline, we will keep trying to playback the operation until it succeeds. So I'd really need to see what's failing to be able to make progress.
Sorry .... David: pointer to how to turn on that logging please. I can't find it in the config editor. Ludovic - where to look for that log? Do you mean on the server?
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging I believe Ludo was referring to the same kind of logging I was, i.e., client-side logging.
Blocks: 678947
Hi - can I please get some help on this one - for me, without Tags, TB is almost unusable, as I rely on them for my task-lists and filters etc. Tags are completely unusable on my installation now - because they get wiped blank on an ongoing basis, even when I think I've got a good connection. I've sent the logs, but don't think David or Ludovic could find anything, is there a next step before I try and find an old functioning version of TB, or do I need to switch back to Pop to have functional Tags?
Create an account and letting us connecting to your server could help -> David would need this more than me.
Mitra: could you try the try server build on bug 678148 ? David's got some fixes there that may help.
Mark: David says "Mitra, your server doesn't do CONDSTORE, from what I can tell from your logs, so you would not be helped by this patch. I think you could run either osx or osx64 builds." i.e. its a different problem. Where are tags stored on the server? I don't see them in the headers in /var/spool/mail/mitra ; there is a directory for .imap with subdirectories for different imap folders with indexes like "dovecot.index" but it doesn't seem to have a directory for the main Inbox?
I don't know where dovecot stores your tags. I do know that in some mailbox configurations, dovecot has a limit of 26 flags, so it most likely is using a bit map storage for the flags. It also looks like you're pushing up against that limit, so if your dovecot server is configured to only remember that many flags, it might explain why you're losing them.
Our sysadmin spotted this error report on the Dovecot list http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2009-March/037864.html and applied the fix, its been working a lot better since then. I'm guessing its something to do with the confirmation of that configuration, AND either bad internet links OR a change made in TB as I certainyl didn't have the problem when I was in S.F. I'm not sure what the bug status should be now .... that Dovecot bug report confirms the problem, its fixed for me, but I suspect others will have the same problem if they happen to leave Dovecot settings in their default setting.
ah, yeah, I thought there was a dovecot issue that could cause this, but I couldn't find a link. Perhaps Roland could add this to a support page somewhere.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
Is there some way to make TB independent of this issue - i..e most TB users won't have access to Dovecot configuration, but maybe the bug isn't common enough to be a high priority problem.
(In reply to Mitra Ardron from comment #14) > Is there some way to make TB independent of this issue - i..e most TB users > won't have access to Dovecot configuration, No, the server is dropping flags. TB can't tell the difference between that and you making changes from an other machine.
Severity: normal → critical
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Keywords: dataloss
Summary: Tag weirdness in Imap when offline or on poor connection → Tag weirdness in Imap when offline or on poor connection. occasionally all my tagging gets lost
Whiteboard: dovecot bug
Forgive me, I am having some difficulty parsing the Dovecot email thread (partially because I have nothing to do with the server itself). Is it basically saying that it is a problem in earlier versions of Dovecot when lazy writes are enabled, but that the problem is fixed in Dovecot v1.1+?
(In reply to Scott Armitage from comment #17) > Forgive me, I am having some difficulty parsing the Dovecot email thread > (partially because I have nothing to do with the server itself). Is it > basically saying that it is a problem in earlier versions of Dovecot when > lazy writes are enabled, but that the problem is fixed in Dovecot v1.1+? I don't know for sure - all that I know for sure is that turning off lazy writes fixes the issue. I suspect not using the mbox format on the server would also fix the issue...
OK; I will try the Dovecot lists and see if I can find out more. For the record, I spoke with our sysadmin: > It's dovecot version dovecot-1.0.beta3-13.6, which should be from the > SLES10 SP3 packages. > > mbox_lazy_writes isn't explicitly enabled, but I think it's enabled by > default.
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