782011 - All my search folders disappeared - and other serious instability.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Mitra Ardron]

All of my search folders just disappeared, I didn't see what triggered it, but I'm pretty sure they all disappared at the same time. All the rest of the (IMAP) folders are there. 

This seems to be one symptom of serious instability that has started appearing in the last few days - including. Column searching not working ; messages showing up a lot with the problem where the Subject line and message don't correspond; and most Gloda searches returning entries that when clicked on don't show hte message and a few others that I'd file as seperate bugs except I have a feeling something connects most of them.

I'm on 16.0a2, it just updated to 2012-08-10 so these errors were probably occuring in the 2012-08-08 or 08-09 releases. 

(Yes I know this is a poor quality, unrepeatable bug, but given the degree of instability I thought it worth posting it).

Comment 1

[Mitra Ardron]

THe failures with Gloda seem to be a re-emergence of the problem of indexes disappearing in some of my Local Archive folders the index has disappared and when you go that folder you get the top level menu, while it rebuilds the index, but if you never go to the folder (which is typical of an archive) then the index doesn't get rebuilt and Gloda fails to display messages that it finds in the folder. 

I'm not sure if this is a seperate bug, or a sympton of something more complex as all these problems appeared pretty much at the same time.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

gloda failing to pull up messages should simply be a result of the bad folder indexes

Comment 3

[Mitra Ardron]

Yes - quite likely, disappearing indexes used to be a previous problem, it hasn't happened for a long time so I suspect its related to the other instability currently evident in TB.

Comment 4

[Kent James (:rkent)]

"All of my search folders just disappeared" I would assume is a corrupted/missing virtualFolders.dat in the profile. You could probably make them reappear by simply restoring that file from a backup.

Comment 5

[Mitra Ardron]

Thanks Kent - Iv'e already rebuilt by hand :-( but what is more concerning is whatever caused them to disappear -a nd search indexes to become corrupt and duplicate entries to start appearing. 

I don't know if others are seeing stability issues with the 16.0a2 nightlies.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Mitra Ardron from comment #5)
> 
> I don't know if others are seeing stability issues with the 16.0a2 nightlies.

I don't think so.

Do you still see this problem?

Comment 7

[Mitra Ardron]

I haven't seen it for a month or so - it did happen at least once more after I reported the problem.