784258 - Thunderbird did not save draft for pop account

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Stephen]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Build ID: 20120713134347

Steps to reproduce:

I had reasonably lengthy text message of about 2,000 words. I made a number of edits over some hours. Auto save was set on five minutes. I often manually saved it after each edit anyway. 


Actual results:

Checked the draft later. None of the edits had been saved. 


Expected results:

Should have been saved.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

- did you start from an initial draft that was located in a subfolder?
- did you try to find your draft in the *main* draft folder of affected account?
- in main draft folder, did you check for duplicate drafts (extra copies of your draft), before or after the draft which lost your edits (sort by date!)?

TB is known to sometimes create multiple copies of same draft, sometimes in location which is different from original draft location.

Comment 2

[Stephen]

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. I've turned off the autosave, and repaired the drafts folder. With important messages in future I'll save it in a word processing document first.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Wada, what happens when autosave of draft and manual saving of draft occur at exactly the same time, or one process starting while the other is not finished (for longer drafts)? I'm thinking of two processes trying to write at the same offset at the same time, and perhaps getting confused.

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Stephen from comment #2)
> Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. I've turned off the autosave, and
> repaired the drafts folder. With important messages in future I'll save it
> in a word processing document first.

Stephen, thanks for feedback. Since you've raised the issue, it would be helpful if you could answer all 3 questions from comment 1 to help us identify potential causes of your problem.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Stephen:
4) Did you compose the affected draft on a notebook computer using a touchpad instead of mouse? Sometimes with touchpads, user can inadvertently select big chunks of text, then if he continues to type, that text will be overwritten and user may not notice.
5) Was it really a text message with no image whatsoever, not even in the signature or in quoted text e.g. of original you replied to? Any error messages while saving?

Comment 6

[Stephen]

Hi Thomas, 
Sure; I'm happy to answer your questions as best I can. 

- did you start from an initial draft that was located in a subfolder?
No, not from a subfolder. It was a fresh, new message that saved in the Drafts folder. 
- did you try to find your draft in the *main* draft folder of affected account?
Yes, I tried to do that. I could not find the draft. I later followed some instructions on the internet and right clicked the Draft folder; this resulted in one of the versions of the draft to appear. 
- in main draft folder, did you check for duplicate drafts (extra copies of your draft), before or after the draft which lost your edits (sort by date!)?
Once I checked the draft folder and found two drafts. I once deleted one that showed a time of some hours before the one I was working on. 

4) Did you compose the affected draft on a notebook computer using a touchpad instead of mouse? Sometimes with touchpads, user can inadvertently select big chunks of text, then if he continues to type, that text will be overwritten and user may not notice.
Yes I use a Thinkpad with a touchpad. Big chunks of text were not deleted. What happened was that certain stylistic adjustments to certain sentences were not saved; but there was nothing 'deleted' or 'overwritten'  
5) Was it really a text message with no image whatsoever, not even in the signature or in quoted text e.g. of original you replied to? Any error messages while saving?
Yes text with no image. It was an original new message. No signatures in quoted text. No error messages. 

I'm a devoted TB user of 12 years. The problem of multiple copies of the same draft in the draft folder is, in my humble opinion, one of the odd quirks of this otherwise outstanding software. With respect, I would really like this otherwise outstanding software just save a single draft copy even when the the user saves manually in addition to using autosave.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Stephen (reporter), bug occurs on POP or IMAP?

Imo, this is likely to be a duplicate of one of the existing bugs about multiple drafts / drafts not saved correctly.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #7)
> Stephen (reporter), bug occurs on POP or IMAP?

Stephen is pop

Comment 9

[Stephen]

Problem was on a pop account. I have not noticed repetition of this problem recently. The multiple draft problem does not appear now, either. I run a gmail IMAP account off TB and this doesn't give any problems.

Comment 10

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Atm I'll leave it to others to analyse and/or resolve this bug.

Are we still saving multiple copies of same draft in drafts folder? I observed some change in that behaviour recently somewhere (trunk?), where I think reopening a draft twice from drafts folder without closing first composition instance will now just open/reactivate a single instance. Maybe multiple draft copies can no longer occur after that change, and even reporter's case might fall into that category where there was a confusion of multiple copies.

I'd still assume that whatever this bug was about, it's nothing we haven't seen yet and on record.
And reporter's comment 9 looks wike wfm.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

WFM per comment 9
Stephen, please comment and reopen the bug if you see this again


(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #10)
> Are we still saving multiple copies of same draft in drafts folder? I
> observed some change in that behaviour recently somewhere (trunk?), where I
> think reopening a draft twice from drafts folder without closing first
> composition instance will now just open/reactivate a single instance. 

there are rare reports