92973 - receiving duplicate emails

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[Jan Carpenter]

Each morning when I get my email, I have 2 of each message.  This happens
throughout the day, but not on every email.  It does, however, happen most of
the time, and so far always when I get my mail for the first time of the day. 
It happens whether the mail goes into my default inbox, or if it's filtered into
a subfolder.

I use IMAP, and have not tested this on mac or linux; only windows.

Comment 1

[Jeff Marden]

Same duplicate emails, except I got them when I emptied the trash while in
trash, then return to inbox and compact folders. When I click on one of the  dup
emails, I get "Unknown Error 80470002" message and email is no longer accessable
(can't delete, move, etc).

Comment 2

[Daniel Wang]

*** Bug 158198 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Daniel Wang]

*** Bug 191562 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Adding track of Bug 188190: Mail downloads all the messages in my pop inbox 
rather than just new ones

Comment 5

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Adding bug 208526. Setting OS=ALL.

pi

Comment 6

[David Newman]

I seem to have a possibly related bug.

Although I do not get duplicates in my IMAP inbox, all messages
moved from there to local folders by message filters are 
duplicated: ever since I upgraded to Mozilla 1.4, lost my old
filters and had to set up some new ones.

<d.r.newman at qub.ac.uk>

Comment 7

[Edwin Goei]

There needs to be a way to filter duplicate email messages based on the
"Message-id" header.  I am often on several email lists and when someone sends a
message to a set of lists, I get the same message several times.  The message is
the same because it has a unique "Message-id" header.  I used to use procmail on
the mail server which can be configured to save these IDs and when new messages
come in, procmail would compare the message-id to the set of saved ones and
discard duplicates.  Unfortunately, I am unable to use procmail any more. :-(  I
am hoping that Mozilla can be extended to do the same thing.

Comment 8

[Dante Treglia]

Hello,

I'm having a similar problem. I pop my mail (from one account) every 10 minutes.
At least once an hour, when new messages arrive, every non-new message in my
inbox is duplicated. If I delete one of the messages, the duplicate will go
blank. To fix the problem I compact my inbox. The Inbox mail text file seems to
be intact (ie. no duplicates), so I assume it must be the msf that is getting
corrupted.

I'm using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007.

Comment 9

[Matthew McClain]

Thunderbird .3 RC 3 (20031008)
Many Pop3 mail accounts; don't keep any mail on the server.
It appeared to affect only 2 inboxes (I don't keep mail in the other ones).

I woke up to find that most of my mail in my Inboxes were duplicate.
I clicked on a couple different folders to see if they were duplicate
and moved back to my main Inbox.  I noticed that many of the messages
that were duplicate disappeared, but I still had a few.

I also noticed that any message I marked "later" had lost that marking.

Also, the unread count became inconsistent with the number of messages
that weren't read; it said 1 and I had no unread messages.  I tried
selecting all the mail and marking unread, that left it as 1 unread.
I used Ctrl-Shift-C to mark all as unread and the unread number disappeared.

I still had duplicate messages.  Since I lost my "later" markings too,
I just deleted my Inbox.msf file, reopenned Thunderbird, and noticed
that the "duplicates" disappeared.

Comment 10

[Chris Pickett]

i just had the same problem as jeff in comment #1, this was mozilla 1.5, please
see bug 171110 for a description

Comment 11

[James E. LaBarre]

I can confirm this behavior as well, have seen in up through Mozilla 1.6b (just
confirmed 1.6b today).

I have wondered if it is an artifact of my particular configuration.  As this is
a dual-boot system, I keep my POP mail on a FAT32 partition.  I configure both
the Windows and Linux profiles to use the same location (profiles are in
D:\MZMail for Windows 2000, which becomes /d/MZMail under Linux).  The profiles
themeselves are seperate (thus no clash between the prefs.js files), just the
mail directories are on /d/MZMail/<profile>/<qzxxxxx.slt>/Mail.

At first, my email will show just one entry in the list per email.  However,
after a time, and numerous automatic retrievals of mail, I will start to see two
or 3 (sometimes more) listings of the same message.  And these will not be for
just the mail messages from today; I will see duplicated entries for *all* mail
in the mailbox, as far back as 15 months ago (messages otherwise unsorted).  If
I switch to a different mail folder then back, the duplicate entries will go away.

When deleting an accumulation of duplicated entries in the inbox, once I delete
the first entry, the text of the message will be there, but the subject line
will go blank.  I am able to select the blank line and "delete" it, though.

Comment 12

[Helge Hielscher]

I can confirm Comment #11. I am also sharing my mail folder between windows and
linux and see exactly the same behaviour.

Comment 13

[Clarence Risher]

Another unique but possibly related experience...  At random (on average once a
week, sometimes as often as 5 minutes apart) I get duplicates of seemingly
random emails.  Some of them are still on my pop server, some arent.  Just today
I got over 500 "new" emails in a 3000+ message folder, all of them duplicates of
old email.

Comment 14

[christian hogue]

i agree. i have this problem on netscape frequently. the client will lose ocunt
of where it is at in the pop downloa dlist and start to re donwload older opo
messages. (i have several machine that download pop email form the same acocunt
but only delete them when i remove them form the mail box. ie they ar eleft on
the server.
i dont have this problem with apple mail for instance so the solution is to fix
the problem wher eit loses count of what messages it is up to in th epop list.
or set up a filter to remove duplicates that are already in the mail box when
downloading new ones. or wehn user initiated to remove exisitng dulpicates from
a mailbox folder.. or other folder..

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

danielwang - the descriptions in this bug (including the initial report) are
rather vague in comparison to the numerous other reports of duplicated mail
(mostly against pop servers). 

For starters, bug 263142, bug 237131, bug 242736, bug 171110 

Is this bug now really a meta bug?  In which case, it seems to me people should
be describing their problems in the bug (one of those many others) that most
closely resembles there situation. And this bug should be updated to include all
those potential blockers.

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #15)
> bug 263142, bug 237131, bug 242736, bug 171110 

all blocking bugs are resolved and reporter email address is bad. so closing this WFM.  FWIW, of the three open bugs above only bug 263142 mentions duplicates.
=> WFM