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Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#41

I wanted to love Thunderbird, used it for years then a bug [0] literally deleted all my emails. I regularly see updates of people understandably raging on the ticket :( It's a bug that literally deletes user data from both the server and the client without warning. It's been open and confirmed for 17 years straight. It could happen to you. How is it not top 1 priority to fix it? [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_…

I had email service expire on a domain and moved it to fastmail. Fastmail, obviously, did not have copies of the email I received before the move. But my phone did. When I updated the configuration in K-9, it contacted the fastmail server, found that the mail it had locally wasn't also present there, and immediately deleted all my local copies. That's not a "bug" in the sense of unintended behavior of the software, b…

You make a good point but this is not a "strange assumption" by any stretch. You see Thunderbird has a "move" action. It allows you to move emails from a folder to another. Now somehow, this is apparently NOT implemented as:

1. Copy from source to destination

2. Verify copy has completed without issue

3. Delete from source

but... some other way? So when you try to move from a server folder to a local client folder by an innocent looking drag an drop, combine this with a poor network connection, a garbage tier legacy protocol like IMAP and decade old C++ spaghetti code, and you get this textbook 17 year old severity 1 bug that will never get fixed.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#43
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof that is bad. > How is it not top 1 priority to fix it? Maybe because it is very rare? I have been using thunderbird for 10 years now on various OSes and never had issues.

It happens to me regularly. You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server using the "repair folder" feature, and I have backup, but it IS infuriating. I have no good alternative to thunderbird, it does so much of what I want. But this bug is awful.

I have been using TB on all operating systems with 8 or 9 users since 2006 and I never even once encountered this issue.

As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs, telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much just guesswork.

Granted given the severity of the consequences I would've chosen a more defensive move-strategy (e.g. one that deletes mails only once they have been copied verifiably), but that would have significant performance impacts in the 99.99% of cases where it works, so finding the real problem is preferable.

The truth is that if this happens to you regularly, that you are probably the prime person to gather more data on this. Call it giving back to Open Source software.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had email service expire on a domain and moved it to fastmail. Fastmail, obviously, did not have copies of the email I received before the move. But my phone did. When I updated the configuration in K-9, it contacted the fastmail server, found that the mail it had locally wasn't also present there, and immediately deleted all my local copies. That's not a "bug" in the sense of unintended behavior of the software, b…

You make a good point but this is not a "strange assumption" by any stretch. You see Thunderbird has a "move" action. It allows you to move emails from a folder to another. Now somehow, this is apparently NOT implemented as: 1. Copy from source to destination 2. Verify copy has completed without issue 3. Delete from source but... some other way? So when you try to move from a server folder to a local client folder by…

Well, interestingly, Thunderbird insists that that is exactly the implementation they're already using.

(see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c69 )

Of course, it isn't; they're relying on an unstable proxy for "copy has completed without issue" in preference to just checking whether that happened or not. Several rather angry users have pointed this out. It doesn't seem to have sunk in.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#45
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the developers can do it

So you expect the developer to create data ex-nihilo for a bug they don't know how to trigger ?

I explicitly do not, which is why my first response spells out that it’s hard to reproduce a bug when all your data is gone. If it is the case that the bug can be reproduced without user data (as suggested by the person I responded to, not me), then the developers should be able to do that better than users can.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#46

I wanted to love Thunderbird, used it for years then a bug [0] literally deleted all my emails. I regularly see updates of people understandably raging on the ticket :( It's a bug that literally deletes user data from both the server and the client without warning. It's been open and confirmed for 17 years straight. It could happen to you. How is it not top 1 priority to fix it? [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_…

[flagged]

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it has to be reproducible. Help make it reproducible and show that to the developers.

How about this bug, which I submitted 13 years ago and still isn't fixed. You can't search for "wedding" : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844 I've been amazed over the years this has never been fixed -- it's very hard not to make jokes about the standard lifestyle of open-source programmers, that they don't consider this a priority (note: that's a joke, I consider myself an open-source programmer. I…

[flagged]

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#48
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof that is bad. > How is it not top 1 priority to fix it? Maybe because it is very rare? I have been using thunderbird for 10 years now on various OSes and never had issues.

It happens to me regularly. You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server using the "repair folder" feature, and I have backup, but it IS infuriating. I have no good alternative to thunderbird, it does so much of what I want. But this bug is awful.

> You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server

But OP said it also deletes the message in the server, so it may be a different bug, right?

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#49

I wanted to love Thunderbird, used it for years then a bug [0] literally deleted all my emails. I regularly see updates of people understandably raging on the ticket :( It's a bug that literally deletes user data from both the server and the client without warning. It's been open and confirmed for 17 years straight. It could happen to you. How is it not top 1 priority to fix it? [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_…

[flagged]

Which might hallucinate some more problems which doesn't exist in the first place?
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