Closed Bug 74591 Opened 24 years ago Closed 23 years ago

Can't delete mail from Inbox

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Product:
SeaMonkey
Component:
MailNews: Message Display
Platform:
x86
All
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: lambart, Assigned: naving)

References

Details

BACKGROUND: Sometimes I can't delete ANY messages from one of my Inboxes. So far I have only seen this problem with my SECONDARY email account, although I use it much more than the primary and this may be coincidental. I am using build 2001040214 but have had this problem over the past few weeks with other recent builds. It is intermittent, I have not figured out how to reproduce it, but I will tell as much as I know. MORE DETAILED SYMPTOMS (identical every time): After selecting a message in my Inbox, I cannot delete the message. I have tried the <Del> key, the toolbar <Delete> button, and Edit|Delete Message from the menu, none fo them work. I can switch to a different mail box, or even the Inbox of my other email account, and delete works just fine. Unfortunately there seem to be no debugging output for message deletion, as I have tried running mozilla -mail from the shell prompt and I see plenty of other debug msgs but nothing happens even when I _successfully_ delete a message. Maybe I could tell you something more helpful if there was some feedback there. WORKAROUND: No sure workaround known. This problem goes away eventually, but I think it's only after restarting mozilla a couple of times. I just tried deleting my Inbox.msf file and the problem still exists. This has consistently fixed another problem I sometimes have where I cannot open the Inbox (it stalls indefinitely with the wristwatch icon). OK, I just restarted mail again, and now I can delete from the Inbox. I just replied to a message, and I'm kicking myself because I'm not sure if I tried to delete _before_ replying to the message so I don't know if replying/composing a msg is at all related. I had just replied to a msg before encountering this problem, but I hadn't tried to delete anything today before that. I will add more comments as I find out more symptoms, but maybe someone else has this problem (a bug search for "can't delete mail" didn't come up with a match.)
QA Contact: esther → sheelar
UPDATE: The problem happened again today. Mozilla mail was started first; no other instances of mozilla were running, though the system was running all night (seti@home). In my 2nd Inbox I tried to delete a message, but no luck. I tried sending a reply to a message to see if composing somehow reset something that triggered the bug (see next-to-last paragraph of yesterday's comments), but still couldn't delete a msg. Then I quit mozilla and restarted it from an xterm window, using "-mail". I could immediately delete a msg. Yesterday's wiping of my .msf file seems to be unnecessary and unrelated. I noticed this error on startup of mozilla. I doubt it's related, but... ************************************************** nsNativeComponentLoader: SelfRegisterDll(/opt/mozilla/components/libpsmglue.so) Load FAILED with error: /opt/mozilla/components/libpsmglue.so: undefined symbol: Implementation__C8nsString **************************************************
I know what triggers this. At least in my case. The problem has to do with "Compact Mail" or whatever the message is (can't open Mozilla because of a D State problem it causes... this D State is kernel related I think so I havent filed a bug report for it). Anyway, after you do the "Compact Mail" you are unable to remove messages until Mozilla is restarted. This is valid from Late March builds (I believe) through 2001040414.
AGAIN TODAY. Well Trever, I've never (explicitly, at least) compacted a folder. Maybe it does it automatically or something, but I wouldn't think so. I just checked again this morning (booted the machine then ran moz first thing) and couldn't delete a message. Restarted (from a shell, with -mail) and deleted one (the same one I was trying to delete before, of course), no problem. I didn't check to see if I could delete mail in other folders before restarting, though I have before and the problem has only ever occurred in the one mailbox... but of course, it's the mailbox I use 95% of the time. Next time it happens I will check other folders to see if I can find a pattern to all this. Meanwhile, some debugging messages relating to deleting would be helpful. How about at least having something print when a delete msg event is received? Let's see if moz is even getting the keypress/mouseclick. I'll bet it is, but right now there is NO output related to deleting at all.
Reporter, Seems like you have multiple accounts. Are they both POP3 or IMAP? Do you see this problem when you open mail from the browser tasks/mail menu only. Does this problem happen when you also open with -mail from the command prompt?
Actually, I rarely run Mail through the Tasks menu at all. I usually start it through a launcher icon I installed in my Gnome taskbar (or whatever it's called) that simply runs "mozilla -mail". As I mentioned above, several times when I have had the problem I have restarted from the shell (so I could see any debugging output), likewise using "mozilla -mail". Yes, I have two accounts and both are POP3. The one with the problem happens to be accessed through a proxy port leading exclusively to my ISP. Even though I can't imagine that my POP connection would cause troubles with deletion, there you are. Just trying to give as much info as I can. One thing that was perhaps unusual about my 'zilla is that I had it installed in /opt/mozilla; when I installed a new build yesterday I moved it to /usr/local/mozilla which is probably the dir used by most folks. Again, can't imagine this would make a difference and it probably falls under the category of "too much information" I haven't tried to delete messages for the last couple of days until just now, and it DID work. I don't have time to do further testing at th emoment. If someone would put some debugging messages in there I might be able to be much more helpful next time this occurs.
Based on reporters comments for now marking this bug as worksforme. Using commercial build 2001-04-11-05 I was able to delete messages the first time I launched mail from browser menu item tasks/mail. Reopen this bug if there a reproducible test case. Thanks reporter for updating the bug.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 24 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
verifying worksforme. buildid-2001-04-15-21
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
This is still happening for me, though I can still not reproduce it consistently. It goes away on restart. One more thing I tried to do today for the first time is to DRAG a message from my Inbox to the Trash. Like all other methods of deletion, this too fails. I CAN delete messages from other mailboxes, INCLUDING as other folders (well, "Sent", anyway--I have no others) in the same account. I wonder how many people are having this problem but just find it easier to restart mozilla than to bother with a bug report. Probably not many simply because people who use two accounts are probably a minority of all mozilla users. I can't believe I am the only one! Sheela: Are you using two accounts with your browser? Have you tried restarting numerous times? This ONLY happens for my second account, ONLY in the Inbox.
OK, I now have started always running mail from a terminal window so I can see any output. Every form of the delete command still gives, frustratingly, absolutely no output to indicate at which point the command has failed. Today I tried once again to drag a message to the Trash can (I had tried that before but not with mozilla running in a terminal window). Here is the output I received: failed to copy messages: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIMessenger.CopyMessages]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger/content/messengerdnd.js :: DropOnFolderTree :: line 403" data: no] This continues to happen pretty much every day. One possible correlation is that I usually have new mail waiting for me in my second POP account at the beginning of my day. When I restart mozilla the mail check returns no new mail, and I can then delete successfully. I will try to reproduce the error by investigating this.
YES! I have found the trigger and this bug is now 100% reproducible FOR ME. I thought it strange that the bug only seemed to occur the first time each day when I opened moz-mail, and now I've figured out why: IF there is mail waiting for me when I open mozilla (Y'all got mail!), I cannot delete ANY mail from that account until I restart with NO mail waiting. Steps to reproduce: 1. Create a second POP account in mozilla mail (this only occurs in secondary account for me) 2. Send yourself a message from any account, to the address of the second account. 3. Close mozilla. 4. Run "mozilla -mail" (any other method also seems to "work") after the e-mail has had time to show up on your POP server. 5. Try to delete this new message or any other message in the account (CANNOT delete; no feedback except drag-n-drop error as detailed in last comment) 6. Close mozilla 7. Restart mozilla -mail 8. Try to delete any message in the account (WORKS) 9. Return to step 2. Repeat until convinced. Unfortunately I tested this with my first/primary POP account and can still not get the error to occur. Now that I can reproduce the error consistently under linux I will try it at home on my Wintel machine. I am very happy with my non-mozilla, non-ms email client at home so have been reluctant to try using mozilla as an email client there, but now I will set it up for testing purposes.
Status: VERIFIED → UNCONFIRMED
Resolution: WORKSFORME → ---
Note that you must completely kill the mozilla instance before you can restart and delete mail. I.E. if you open a browser window from 'zilla-mail to make a bug report, =), you can close and reopen the mail window (Ctrl-2) but you can still not delete any messages. You must close any browser windows as well and return to the shell prompt before restarting mozilla from scratch. Then you can delete mail.
I see this too on 2001041804. The mail has gotten so bad that it is unusable right now. How did it regress so much? These things used to work.
commercial buildid: 2001-04-19-08 on linux-red hat 6.2 version. I am not able to reproduce this when I follow your reproducible test steps. What are are your prefs set in the settings Biff interval? Leave messages on the server yes or no? Delete mssgs on the server when deleted locally-checked or unchecked. Have you saved your password for the second account in password manager?
There are some instances where move/copy does not work from the search window. May be those instance are reproducible from 3-pane also. I am working on move/copy code for local folder, reassigning to self.
Assignee: sspitzer → naving
In response to Sheelar. I am currently using RedHat 7.0, Mozilla 2001-04-11-08; I don't generally update my build unless I see useful fixes posted on mozillazine. Biff interval translates to? Perhaps you mean the mail-checking interval. I have it set to 10 minutes for both accounts. Here are the server settings that both accounts have in common: YES: Check for new mail at startup (now that I think of it I will try playing with this) YES: Check for new messages every (10) minutes YES: Automatically download any new messages (is this relevant for POP?) YES: Leave messages on server NO: Limit message download size NO: Empty trash on exit The only things different between the two are: Primary account (has no problem)-- YES: del. msgs on server when del'd locally Secondary account (has the bug) -- NO (my client @ home kills them after 3 days) Primary account: Port 110 Secondary account: non-standard port (hole in firewall opened specifically to access my ISP's pop server) The greyed-out Server Name and User Name are of course also different between the two. After installation, the original directories had an extra "Mail" in the path, i.e."/home/eric/.mozilla/eric/wk1lql32.slt/Mail/Mail/proxy". I have since taken that out, so it's really ..../sk11ql32.slt/Mail/proxy etc. I just noticed the button "Set as Default" (between "New Account" and "Remove Acct"). I don't know how to tell which one is currently the "Default". I presume my first-listed account is "Default" since I never changed this setting. And, to answer Sheelar's last question: Yes, I have saved the password for both accounts.
I have 3 mail accounts. IMAP (primary) and 2 POP3 accounts. Lately I can delete mail on the first POP3, but not the second one (Win2k, April 18 Mozilla build). I also cannot MOVE the messages to another folder.
buildid: 2001042308 I finally see this problem. However this is not reproducible all the time. After trying for Nth time I finally see this only once. My profile has imap and pop account I sent a message to my second account(pop) from imap account. Closed mail before the message arrived in the second account Relaunch '-mail' Tried to delete (from toolbar button, context menu, menu item -delete message) unable to delete the new message or any message in the inbox.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
It always triggers when I access the second pop account (I also have a primary IMAP account). So, you need 3 accounts to see it all the time.
Actually, James, I just have --two-- POP accounts, and it's still consistently a problem on the second account. BTW, Sheela are you sure you are closing ALL windows of ALL instances in between running the test? If I recall correctly, the problem does not manifest itself if you leave any part of Mozilla running before restarting. I didn't notice the problem this morning, and after writing the above thought (and saving it to the clipboard), I sent myself a message, shut down mozilla and checked the linux process list, and indeed I found two crashed instances of mozilla that were running even though there were no windows left open. I killed them, restarted mozilla -mail and, once again, the bug bit me. As far as I'm concerned, that pretty much confirms what I said: Even a separately-executed instance of mozilla will prevent the problem from occuring. (Despite the drain on resources, I regularly run two or more instances of mozilla because then when mozilla segfaults--or however it inevitably dies--I only lose the contents of the windows belonging to that instance.)
please tell me you're not running two instances of mozilla against the same profile, and even worse, the same mail folders. If so, you're going to be in a world of hurt. I believe what's happening is that the local folder is getting its timestamp out of sync with the database and we have to reparse the folder.
I only run more than one instance of the browser, NEVER the mail client (except for the rare accidental case where I've hit the wrong button). That could obviously get very ugly if the app doesn't know how to deal with it, though I can't imagine why mozilla would allow users to do that in the first place!! Preventing multiple mail client instances seems like a most basic preventative measure for googles of ugly "bugs", especially at the app's current stage of development, where such things should be taken care of by now. And I certainly hope I can "legally" run more than one concurrent instance of the browser, given how crash-prone it is. Too many times I've had the mail client crash and destroy some hard-to-find web page that was open in another window, or had the browser crash and wipe out a message I was in the process of writing. Today I was curious and clicked onto Mozilla's very own "Look at Bonsai" page, of all things, which crashed (segfaulted?) and took an important window with it!!! ACK. Anyway, my reproducibility tests for the bug in question were definitely done with only one instance of any kind running (and then stopping, restarting, etc.) Also, I only have one profile so yes, I would be running multiple browser instances against that.
I only run one Mozilla at a time. In fact, if I have a crashed version there ( a common occurrence), I am unable to start another Mozilla. By the way, Every time I run java chats, Mozilla never exits cleanly and always hangs. I really have problems believing that the Mozilla Developers can use Mozilla reliably for daily work. The old Netscape or IE always work better.
Don't get me started about other browsers! Mozilla shows great promise, and is certainly more faithful to Netscape's original pioneering spirit than any recent versions of NS have been. I like to hope that once Mozilla is at least as compatible with HTML standards as IE, mozilla/Netscape will once again be able to lead the field rather than the current state of things. I'll shut up now, this is not the proper forum. REGARDING THE BUG: For the first time this morning, I had trouble deleting messages from my primary account. I swear. It's not the first time I started the mail client with messages waiting in that account, either. The really weird thing is that after going into my second account (where I also could not delete), I returned to the first and was able to delete things... but I was STILL not able to delete from the second account until I restarted. I am really starting to wonder why I spend time trying to help diagnose, reproduce, and report clues about this bug when, of the six netscape/mozilla folks that are CC'd to this bug (one of whom, I would hope, owns a relevant part of the application), no one has seen fit to add any debugging output to the console. This is of course the first thing I would do if it were my own application. Maybe now that Sheela has seen the bug, and it is no longer "unconfirmed", someone will do this? If not, I'm getting _really_ tired of wasting time trying to help on this.
I have found a better work around. I am able to move the messages I want to delete to the local trash folder, and I can delete the messages in that. So I wonder where the "trash" folders for the separate mail accounts are located? Unlike the copies or templates, the user has no control over them that I can see. Maybe they are going to an illegal path/place?
If it helps, I encountered this bug (quite regularly I may add) after I established my second account. However, my accounts are both IMAP based, not POP.
*** Bug 80900 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Please note that my bug 80900 is for Win NT. I suggest to the owner to change the OS to All from Linux. Also, it happens for my primary account, which is the second on the list after the Local folders. It was the only one with automatic logon and downolad. My Best Workaroud: Do not let Mozzila to automatically login and download new messages after its startup. Just let Moz start and then click the Download new messages. I have never seen the bug with this setup. Therefore, I think the bug is in the automatic login and download part of the mail. From the description I see I would guess that the problems are with the last account that has automatic logon and download. Or am I wron here? Pure guess: Aren't the messages of the (last?) account with automatic login "permanently locked / locked without unlock" during the automatic download to prevent their loss in case of a bad connection?
OS: Linux → All
On Win2k, I tried not checking for mail automatically, both on startup and periodically. It did NOT solve the problem for me!
not being able to delete email seems to be a potential beta show stopper, so adding nsbeta1 to keywords to add it to radar. I also experience this problem with build 2001052904, pop, Win 95. The "work around" about not automatically downloading new mail does not work for me either - I never automatically download email. Are these delete problems associated with other delete email bugs like 81578, 80897, 44572 and especially bug 63550? Bugs 47645 and 81103 all seem to be about delete performance and might also be related.
Keywords: nsbeta1
johng, could you show me the problem on your machine ?
I still have this problem on one of my two pop accounts (the primary one). I can however, move the files to the local trash folder and delete that manually. On a slightly different tangent, I can not find any way to delete a message without opening it. Selecting it in the inbox always opens it. This is a necessity when you get virus-laden e-mails! My work around is to read a good message, and ctrl-click the junk and delete them all. But then a good message gets trashed too. Rightclicking a message should brong up a menu with delete on it without opening the message!
I used to get this bug regularly...Version < 0.9.1...However, I have not run into this problem in 0.9.1. This is curious, because this bug has never been one to hide...Anyone repro'd on build >= 2001060713? I can't repro it anymoure...
I just tried it with the latest build 2001060903 and it says moving message to trash, but nothing happens. So for me it is not fixed.
Upgraded to Mozilla 0.9.1 Build 2001060703, the bug disappeared overhere as well. I'm now able to delete messages when there are new messages for my second account. Both dragging and hitting the delete button did their work as designed. Still puzzled what caused the bug to disapear. (for me, cause i see people still have the problem with the new build)
I have 3 pop mail and 2 IMAP accounts. delete only fails on the first account with yesterday's build. But that has not changed.
James, if you close the splitter between the header and messages then you can select and delete without loading a message. This bug may have disappeared for some people because we fixed a focus bug where the delete key wasn't always working around 6/7 There's another bug out there about hitting stop preventing delete from happening. Is that what people are seeing?
The "delete message without opening it" hint is sure unobvious. If you right click on a message harder it should give you choices like delete without opening the message. Only left clicks should open it. I still cannot delete messages from the primary mailbox. I have another perhaps related problem. I added a new IMAP account and it cannot preperly send messages. The messages goes off, but the window hangs while trying to "copy the message to the sent folder." I tried moving this to local files/sent but no better luck.
Same problem reproduced on LINUX with release 0.91 (unable to delete mail from Inbox)
I've also experienced this bug. I'm using the 0.9.2 release version, build 2001062815 on Windows 98. It has shown up when I've tried to delete from the Inbox or other folders of my primary account (I have 2 POP3 accounts). I don't use my secondary account enough to say that it isn't happening there as well. When I've been unable to delete a message, I've tried to view the Trash folder. After selecting the trash folder, the title bar of the mail window did not change to "Trash," and no messages were displayed (even though the trash folder had not been emptied). The same happened for another folder on the same account. After deleting the .msf files for the nonfunctioning folders, their messages again displayed. After that, I was able to move messages in and out of the other folder, but still, not in and out of trash (by explicitly dragging the message or by pressing the delete key). In some cases, maybe the two problems are related? I am only running 1 copy of Mozilla at a time, and 1 mail session.
I have this problem new, I can't delete mail from the inbox or any other folder, using any method. I also tried moving/filing e-mail into the trash folder, didn't work. Interestingly, this happened shortly after I created new folders and mail filters, but everything worked correctly for several days after I made those. I also started to have the problem with it telling me I have unread messages in folders when all the messages were read, but that went away. I'm using 0.9.2.
A related problem I have been seeing is that I (more often than before) cannot send mail because Mozilla hangs while trying to copy the mail to the sent folder. I have tried moving the location of this from the mail instance to local folder/sent, but that also does not work. I also turned off the option to copy the sent messages, and that does not always stop the attempt. I am on build 2001070603 right now...
The send mail error dialog that pops up is just a generic one and we should change the wording because it may have nothing to do with copy.
Greetings, I often see a similar bug but maybe I'm in the position to provide more details. My setup consists of a Linux RedHat 7.0, Mozilla 0.9 binary (not .rpm) downloaded from mozilla.org, and four POP3 accounts (check at startup and every 10 minutes, but do not download automatically - see below) from localhost (fed through fetchmail). First of all: for me, removing the .msf and restarting Mozilla (Mail is not enough) solves the problem 100% of the time. As far as I can tell, the problem occurs when mail is downloaded for an account other than the one selected - with the blue background in the folder pane to the left and shown in the message pane to the right. This is why I disabled automatic download - I always got stuck with messages I could not delete. To download mail, I explicitly select the account and use the "get msg" drop down menu to get messages from the selected account. I gave up getting all messages for all accounts, automatically or manually (Ctrl-Shift-T), but I think it would result in being unable to remove messages from all but the selected account. I think the bug should be easy to reproduce using POP accounts from free email providers subscribed to high-volume mailing lists, for a steady stream of incoming messages, disabling automatic download and using Ctrl-Shift-T.
If it's any help: the bug still persists on Mozilla 0.9.4. I have two POP accounts set up. I cannot delete from the second one. Only one instance of Mozilla is running. When I started Mozilla today, I didn't get any new mail for that account. Anyhow I am unable to delete mail. It just worked rarely for single mails sometimes. Cannot reproduce how. Maybe it is because I configured it to keep the messages for the second POP on the server?
Blocks: 104166
Keywords: nsbeta1+
Greetings, in my experience, this bug has been fixed with Mozilla 0.9.2.1 as shipped with Redhat 7.2 (build ID 2001090111). My configuration is in a preceding comment, but basically consists of multiple POP3 accounts with different ISPs all set to download mail (not leaving it on server) upon request. Since Koerber still cannot delete mail in 0.9.4, I guess his problem was different.
ok, deleting mail from 2nd pop3 acct fixed in another bug.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 24 years ago → 23 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Navin, Can you mention the bug number? This is for my information.
Just verified bug 108774 which is the same problem. Marking this bug as verified now that this problem is fixed. If you see any other problem with delete or move on the new builds after 108774 was fixed please log a new bug. Build Id: 2001-11-09-06 win98, linux, mac os x
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Product: Browser → Seamonkey
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