938105 - POP Mail account having Inbox randomly blanked - messages marked 0x0008 "Already Gone", complete wipe of folders under Inbox

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Backend, defect)

Description

[Michael Lueck]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131025151332

Steps to reproduce:

At random times for the past several release versions of SM, a particular account's Inbox will be completely emptied.

I discovered that the Inbox file itself still had the messages, and that they were being marked 0x0008 "Already Gone". Here is the workaround I have been using to correct the problem:

"Recovering deleted emails from Thunderbird"
http://blog.coryfoy.com/2007/01/recovering-deleted-emails-from-thunderbird/#comment-211

That sed script I run to fix the Inbox folder.

Further, I used to have deeply nested mail sort folder trees under each account's Inbox. All of that structure was getting completely wiped when what ever is happening would occur. I have since been advised to create an alternate root for my sorted mail folders at the same level as Inbox itself. I have done so, named it "Sorted Mail", moved all sort folders under that new root, and fortunately when the "Inbox gets blanked" all sorted mail is safe under the "Sorted Mail" folder.

The problem with mail still getting randomly marked 0x0008 "Already Gone" still occurs randomly even after I relocated my sorted mail subfolder trees.

I have each POP account having its own Inbox and folder tree. I use the "Local Folders" tree to retain NNTP news group posts for off-line reading. "Local Folders" thus is not associated with any POP account.

I see these behaviors on the Mozilla official binaries compiled for Linux x64 installed via UbuntuZilla. I have not seen this problem with builds of SeaMonkey running on Windows XP x86. I need to migrate additional users to Linux from Windows, thus I am very nervous about migrating them to a less stable platform.

It has been suspected in the mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey news group that I might be seeing the problem since I use the XFS filesystem for my Linux /home partition. Why the filesystem would be responsible for randomly marking all messages 0x0008 "Already Gone" and nuking any folders under Inbox is beyond my comprehension. At times I will have switched to a different Workspace having left SeaMonkey in a particular account's Inbox, and when I return to my SeaMonkey workspace all mail is gone. So I must exit SM and run the sed script to get my mail back. One time I noticed the problem had happened... Inbox had say 8 new messages in it while all older mail had disappeared. I then switched accounts, replied to a message under that account, when I clicked back to the broken Inbox - then even those 8 new messages had disappeared.

This is only occurring for the last several versions of SM Linux x64. When I first switched from Thunderbird to SeaMonkey, then it was stable for a good long time. I had been stuck running Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 for years, abandoned by the Thunderbird developers blocking bulk rebuilds of MSF index files. Fortunately SeaMonkey has not prevented using the "Search" tool from rebuilding indexes when it encounters in invalid one. So please leave that functionality intact within the SM code base! Unfortunately I do not seem to have yet retained my last Thunderbird profile backup, so I cannot give you a date as to when I switched over to SM. Just, "back then" this problem definitely was NOT happening and I have been running the Linux x64 version all along since switching to SM. Oh, I happened to send the UbuntuZilla developer a thank you note when I did the migration: On Tue, Oct 26, 2010. So perhaps in the last six months has this been a bug in SM, the time prior starting at On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 it was not having this problem.


Actual results:

Randomly mail in POP accounts disappears.


Expected results:

Mail should not be disappearing randomly.

Comment 1

[Michael Lueck]

A couple of additional points which came to mind...

Of the accounts that have exhibited this nastiness, All are set to fetch mail once per minute. Someone commented that perhaps it had something to do with auto-fetch... "Yes, I have auto-fetch enabled. Is that unusual?!"

No email account is set to allow SM to compact it. I perform manual compaction.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Michael, do you still see this problem?

Comment 3

[Michael Lueck]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, use Needinfo for questions) from comment #2)
> Michael, do you still see this problem?

Greetings Wayne,

Someone years ago suggested it was NOT SAFE with SeaMonkey to create folders under the InBox folder.

I created a "Sorted Mail" folder at the same level as InBox, moved all my subfolders there, and have not been bitten again by this nasty bug.

Perhaps a difference between the Thunderbird 2.x Mozilla source code tree and the SM source code tree. I always thought it perfectly normal to create subfolder trees right off the InBox root folder. (shrug)

OTOH, I still see this one regularly...
[Bug 593519] "Unable to expand a folder's subfolders without opening the folder first in a new email window"

Again, I never saw that back when I was on Thunderbird 2.x.

Comment 4

[Michael Lueck]

(In reply to Michael Lueck from comment #3)

P.S. Presently I am running SM: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0 SeaMonkey/2.39

As usual, from the UbuntuZilla repository.