801443 - [Feature Request]: solving various problems with 'popstate.dat' by backup and user prompts

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: POP, enhancement)

Description

[therob]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0
Build ID: 20121010144125

Steps to reproduce:

1. PC with W7 crashed (freezed) because of some non-TB problems.
2. TB16 was running (and probably was connected to pop-server).
3. I restarted TB after hard-reboot of PC.


Actual results:

popstate.dat was deleted or corrupted by the crash --> TB started immediately with downloading al my thousands mails in my pop-inbox from the server again.

This happend unfortunately more than 5 times in the last weeks (because of unintendent PC reboot) at various (sometimes unstable) PCs.

I could do a workaround by:
- going offline to stop download
- removing all messages newer than the last correct downloaded mail before failure by help of sorting messages by 'order of entrance' (german:'Eingangsreihenfolge')
- removed all messages of server-inbox in a new folder of server (-->server inbox = empty)
- deleted 'popstate.dat' (not neccassary)


Expected results:

[Feature Request]:
The following feature request would also solve some other bugs connected with popstate.dat

1. making a backup of popstate.dat
  - before TB checks the pop-server
  - and/or once a day
2. opening an user prompt
  - when TB finds an empty or corrupted popstate.dat file (e.g. after crash)
       (--> e.g. 'The popstate.dat seems to be corrupted/empty. Shall TB switch to offline mode that user can fix the problem?' [Yes / No, continue])
  - when TB wants to download a huge amount of mails (e.g. n>100)
       (---> e.g. 'TB wants to download a big amount of mails (number). Is this intentionally?' [Yes-->Download / No-->go offline to fix]

Comment 1

[:aceman]

Yeah, this is a big problem. Popstate.dat is fragile and if you lose it then all messages are redownloaded (or if the server name changes, or the username, or the server renumbers messages).
There are reports like this, but I am not sure those cover your proposals. So I am not duping just yet.