Thunderbird maildir manipulation error

Mike A. Harris mharris at www.linux.org.uk
Thu May 12 01:55:40 UTC 2005


Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> Hi,
> I am going to submit a bug for thunderbird and, since I have not
> installed anything newer than FC3, I would like to ask your help for
> testing this in FC4test and/or rawhide.
> The bug is related to maildir manipulation (using Dovecot IMAP
> server); here are the steps to reproduce:
> 
> 1. create a "test" folder 
> 2. create a "test2" subfolder inside "test"
> 3. try to move test2 to the top level
> 
> With the installed thunderbird-1.0.2-1.3.2 I got this error:
> 
> The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: Mailbox exists..
> 
> just to be sure this problem was not related to the server, I tried
> with evolution (evolution-2.0.4-4) and it works as expected, that is,
> the folder is successfully moved.
> I will report this against the FC3 version of thunderbird unless
> someone can confirm the same error appears in more recent versions.

Aha!  I have gotten this bug many times but did not have a reliable
100% way of reproducing it, so never filed a bug report!

What happens is you get the error message you've supplied, or you
get another one "The mail server responded: Invalid mask".  Either
error message puts thunderbird into an infinite loop, where it
puts the error dialog up, you click OK *or* cancel, and it puts up
another dialog with a different message (don't have it handy
currently, and I'm not anxious to see it again as it is very difficult
to recover from this bug) - then you click ok or cancel again, and
the first error comes up again.  It makes no difference how many
times you click on OK or cancel, thunderbird keeps cycling through
these two dialog boxes forever, until you kill the program from
the commandline with "killall thunderbird-bin".

With the "Invalid mask" error, if I restart thunderbird, it no longer
works anymore, and goes right back to the looping dialog boxes.  The
only way I've been able to fix thunderbird at this point, is to:

- killall thunderbird-bin
- backup .thunderbird/*
- move .thunderbird .thunderbird-old
- cd mail ; find . -regex "\.\(imap\|subscriptions\)" -exec rm -rf {} \;
- start thunderbird again, and it now acts like you just started it for
   the first time ever
- completely reconfigure all my imap accounts, smtp, etc.
- completely reconfigure the UI to work the way I want
- completely reconfigure per-folder options for all my folders

Then it works normally again, until the next time I move a folder and
trigger the bug.  The problem is, it is such a hassle to recover from
the problem, and very time consuming, that it is hard to make a useful
bug report about it, without intentionally causing a lot of mayhem.

If you file a bug for this, let me know and I'll add whatever details
I think might be useful to it too.

For the record - this has happened with every version of thunderbird
I've used since 1.0, up to and including the current 1.0.2 from
rawhide.  It happens with the binary build in rawhide, as well as
with thunderbird recompiled for FC1 with a couple of patches disabled
(pango mainly).

While experiencing this problem, I've used the Windows XP build of
thunderbird a few times just so I could access my mail while 
troubleshooting the problems in Linux that I was experiencing.  I've
not yet encountered the bug in any of the Windows builds of
thunderbird, but it could just be that the problem exists there too
and I haven't triggered it yet.  I don't use it enough in XP to
really know either way, but if it would be helpful in any way to
resolving the problem, I could torture myself for a few days to
use XP for mail.

HTH




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