997427 - Deleted saved drafts from Draft folder without any input by me

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 497952

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[rmgarrett]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140314220517

Steps to reproduce:

With T-Bird open, I was reading e-mails that I had received in a POP account.  I was not then composing any e-mail and had no draft e-mails open for composing.  My draft folder was a local folder for the POP account.  I was running Win7 64 bits and T-Bird was v. 24.4.0.  Account Settings > Disc space was set to never delete messages.  A small number of drafts remained in my Drafts folder, as messages that were still in various stages of composition, which I had saved as drafts so that I could return to edit and send them at a later time.  Without any input or request by me, T-Bird apparently deleted some of the saved drafts from the Drafts folder.


Actual results:

While I was reading messages from my Inbox, T-Bird flashed a message (in the bar at the bottom) (that disappeared shortly thereafter) indicating that xx messages had been deleted from the Drafts folder. Since I had a small number of Drafts still in that folder, I didn't then know and still don't know which (if any) drafts T-Bird actually deleted.  And none of those xx deleted messages showed up at that time in my Trash folder.  I can't tell which, if indeed any, of my saved drafts were actually deleted by T-Bird, and have not been able to locate any of those deleted messages in my Drafts or Trash folders, incl. by checking the remaining contents for X-Mozilla-Status: 0008 using a text editor.  (I can view hidden files.)  Those folders had not then been compacted since the occurrence of the problem. This subsequently happened again.  Thee "xx" in the message has displayed different numbers on the different occurrences of the message.


Expected results:

Since I wasn't dealing with any drafts, and had no delayed send of any type active that might have then been sending any mail, no deletion of messages from my Draft folder should have occurred.  (I wonder if T-Bird could have simply been reporting that xx number of messages had been deleted from the Drafts folder (such as because they were sent after editing???) since some previous event or report--if that is what is occurring, however, that should be clarified in some way)

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

rmgarret, sorry for the irritating UX where TB flashes that "Deleted x drafts..." message and thanks for filing. This has been reported before by several users, but we're looking for a volunteer to fix this problem.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Oh, forgot to mention that most likely (as explained in Bug 497952 Comment 16), TB is NOT deleting any drafts that you have created (so there's no dataloss), but it's just an odd technical thing where auto-save saves a new draft and then deletes the old one, and somehow the counting is confused, and you might see the confusing status/activity manager message also after sending where all those auto-saved drafts deleted before will be mentioned again.

Comment 3

[KitchM]

I, too, have experienced this very same issue many times.  There are a number of things happening here.  First is clearly a lack of accuracy in the way the the programmers designed TB.  The Activity Manager does not work as it should, and does not provide the necessary and accurate feedback of historical activity.  Second is the problem with proper checks and balances.  No program should do anything with data unless the user authorizes it.  Further, no program should fail to offer an undelete method.  I also notice that the messages are not properly handled in that they pass by too fast and are not controllable.  These are big and serious flaws.

We need a settings manager that allows us to set controls over autodeletes, compacting, and saving.

I hope someone starts working on the fundamental design of TB before adding any more "features".