Thunderbird maildir manipulation error

Mike A. Harris mharris at www.linux.org.uk
Thu May 12 02:02:35 UTC 2005


Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 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:

Hate to reply to myself, but thought I'd add a couple more data
points in case they were useful also.  I am using thunderbird
exclusively connecting to imap mailboxes when these errors
trigger.  The imap server is running on the same machine, and
is dovecot.  I've tried different versions of dovecot and
it didn't change anything.  Once thunderbird encounters the
error, restarting dovecot wont change it.  Using different
version of dovecot wont change it either.  I tried using UW-imap,
and that just screwed up my imap mailbox subscriptions in tbird,
and left me with a totally unuseable setup.

I saw someone mention this could be a dovecot bug, and that is
entirely possible, but thunderbird enters into an endless loop
of dialog boxes requiring you to kill the binary, so there's
definitely a thunderbird bug also, even if it is a mail server
bug being the catalyst.

HTH




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