763815 - Inbox Messages Disappear.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Scott]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0
Build ID: 20120601045813

Steps to reproduce:

I hit the Delete key with one Inbox message highlighted and all the messages in my inbox disappeared.  I tried Edit-Undo Delete Message a few times but it does nothing.  I am able to see all the messages in all my other folders and the missing Inbox messages are not in my Trash folder or Deleted Items folder. I tried Edit->Folder Properties->Repair Folder. Still no messages in my Inbox.


Actual results:

All the messages in my Inbox disappeared and it stopped receiving new messages.


Expected results:

The one message highlighted should have been deleted and then moved to the Trash folder.

Comment 1

[:aceman]

Are you on 12.0.1?

Comment 2

[Scott]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #1)
> Are you on 12.0.1?

Yes, I was on 12.0.1 yesterday when my inbox messages disappeared but I upgraded this morning to 13.

Comment 3

[:aceman]

I do not have knowledge about the problem as you describe it.
Can you point to the Thunderbird support site articles where users talk about this?

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

is this a pop account?

this problem typically happens because of compacting or/and antivirus software

Comment 5

[Scott]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #3)
> I do not have knowledge about the problem as you describe it.
> Can you point to the Thunderbird support site articles where users talk
> about this?

This is the Thunderbird Support site where I posted my issue and you can see several others are also losing their inbox messages. https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/tags/inbox

Thank you.

Comment 6

[Scott]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #4)
> is this a pop account?
> 
> this problem typically happens because of compacting or/and antivirus
> software

Thank you for your response.  Yes, this is a pop account.  I download messages from my Comcast email.  I use Microsoft Security Essentials and Norton Security Suite and they do not cause me any other problems.  I did not compact my inbox, I just deleted one specific, highlighted email.  Does the compacting process happen automatically, and if it does can I turn off compacting?

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Scott from comment #6)
> (In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #4)
> > is this a pop account?
> > 
> > this problem typically happens because of compacting or/and antivirus
> > software
> 
> Thank you for your response.  Yes, this is a pop account.  I download
> messages from my Comcast email.  I use Microsoft Security Essentials and
> Norton Security Suite and they do not cause me any other problems.  I did
> not compact my inbox, I just deleted one specific, highlighted email.  Does
> the compacting process happen automatically, and if it does can I turn off
> compacting?

tools | options | advanced | network and disk

I tag lost message issues related to compact with "compactlost" https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/tags/compactlost

Comment 8

[Scott]

Thank you, Wayne.  Losing Inbox messages still seems to be a serious issue for Thunderbird so I hope a good solution will be developed.

Comment 9

[halfdog]

I think I observed same behavior also 2 times with seamonkey on linux so all MS security/virus scan is not an issue.

The two events had that characteristics:

* Box data corruption occurred days before observed data loss (when looking into backups)
* Before data loss, some messages were corrupted, e.g. when clicking on it, the from/to headers were missing, no text in the message view pane
* The corruption is persistent between restarts (messages stay corrupted).
* When compacting, the message list contains only e.g. 2 messages (12 were lost), while the folder overview says 14 messages.
* After another restart, seamonkey corrects the number of messages from 14 to 2, hence also index is updated to lost data

Dataloss occurred only after compacting of folders, those folders with high throughput (e.g. inbox with lkml message) were more likely to suffer loss due to more frequent compaction intervall

@Mozilla-devs: due to severity of this issue: could you please create one central tracking issue, where all those diffuse data loss issues can be attached?

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you still encounter this issue when using a current version ?

Comment 11

[halfdog]

I do not have any reliable reproducer at hand, the two observed events were due to frequent usage together with frequent backups for diagnosis. As I stopped using Shunderbird meanwhile, I did not observe any more events. Sorry, but it seems I cannot be of much help for this issue.