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Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

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Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#271

Post by account42 »

berkes wrote: post #75
thaumasiotes wrote: post #36

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…

I'd wager that this is marked as "by design" because it technically follows some IMAP spec. What the app does, purely on a technical level, is correct. I've so often had debates and threads in issues where a developer entrenched in a domain has so much domain-knowledge (ie. tunnel vision) that "technically correct" or "by the spec" is the only correct way. I've been that developer in many cases too, in hindsight.

Some developers incorrectly think a spec defines what your program should do instead how to do what your users want.

Another example is HTTP Strict-Transport-Security which specifies that browsers should take control away from users.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#272

Post by account42 »

globular-toast wrote: post #78
fouronnes3 wrote: post #16

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_…

Hopefully this prompted you to check your backups?

Backups should not be your first lone of defense.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#273

Post by account42 »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #176
blacklion wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time. It was not better for me than old FIDONet GoldEd 2.8x! It didn't (and doesn't) support proper threads, it supports effectively only top-quoting, it didn't (and doesn't) understand mailing lists in any way, it didn't support forward-as-attachment in both ways (now it supports it, though). Its filt…

How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it. Gmail: - see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content - in your inbox / archive view, mix both sent and incoming emails in such conversations,…

> How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ?

I used an extension once but it broke at some point.

> - see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content

Or not so smart hiding of "repeated" content like say an image with a different URL but hey the rest of the tag is the same so close enough for Gmail.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#274

Post by 1718627440 »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #270
1718627440 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't two search boxes. There is a search box in/below the titlebar and a filter for the current folder.

And if there were two driving wheels in your car, a one for turning right and an other one for turning left you would say there is no two driving wheels in your car.

A filter is different from searching. It only works on the current directory, it alters the view after it has been generated. You can also use it on a search.

Don't know about others, but I find the functionality useful and use them for different purposes. Searching is when I want to find random messages, where I don't know where or from when there are, the filter is for bulk processing and narrowing the current working set, beside the conversation level.

It is more like the steering wheel and choosing forward/reverse, sure both are for choosing the driving direction, but they operate at different levels and are used in different situations. I mean you could use the steering wheel for forward/backward if you want to. Using the gear to change the direction less than 180° is quite difficult, but not impossible.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#275

Post by 1718627440 »

berkes wrote: post #75
thaumasiotes wrote: post #36

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…

I'd wager that this is marked as "by design" because it technically follows some IMAP spec. What the app does, purely on a technical level, is correct. I've so often had debates and threads in issues where a developer entrenched in a domain has so much domain-knowledge (ie. tunnel vision) that "technically correct" or "by the spec" is the only correct way. I've been that developer in many cases too, in hindsight.

I got also bitten by this. While IMAP would allow for syncing, most MUAs don't have a local mailbox. Instead they have a cache and the offline mode means to put as much as possible in to the cache. But if you want an actual local mail storage, you will eventually have merge conflicts, because how do you deal with a message that is present locally and was on the server, but is no longer? Do you assume the user wants it deleted, or that it should be reuploaded to the server? Either way will be wrong. (Also if you reupload, it will get a new UID, so another MUA will again reupload it, i.e. you will get a copy per MUA.)

So if you want a mailbox sync tool, use a proper program for that like mbsync/isync. (But this can't cope with cross mailbox moves besides (not) propagating them.)

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#276

Post by 1718627440 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #245
thaumasiotes wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and is so terrible folks swear off Thunderbird forever because I guess for email very basic rules for backing up data don’t apply (or something?) Well, this bug literally causes Thunderbird to delete your original copies of data during the backup process, so I'm not sure why backing up your data is supposed to be the solution.

Thunderbird stores mail locally on disk. If you're keeping backups of your disk, then this bug is not unrecoverable.

But keep in mind, that this is a cache. An UIDVALIDITY change will wipe everything out.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#277

Post by godelski »

justin66 wrote: post #258
godelski wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully those people will report the issue in the bug report and try to help the devs reproduce the issue. Especially since it is linked.

I don't think one more user report is going to be the difference that pushes them over the finish line after two decades. Let's not pretend the developers have been taking this bug seriously.

They still have it marked as unreproducible. What do you expect them to do if they can't reproduce?

So yeah, I do think more user reports can help. At worse, it will make them take it more seriously if there are more reports.

You also are falling to observation bias. You can see linked in the issue as well as by searching that there are similar issues that were resolved and marked solved. So I don't think they were just doing nothing as everyone seems to be assuming.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#278

Post by godelski »

account42 wrote: post #259
jraph wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I do think the thundebird team should investigate and fix this. But it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't reproduce and have no clue why it might be happening.

Reproducing bugs is a luxury and not even close to required for analyzing and fixing issues. Even if the issue is external (hardware, antivirus, etc.), the code can be changed to be more defensive and only ever delete the original when the new data has been successfully written and verified.

You're right, but you're also wrong.

The problem is you can never close the bug report if you can't reproduce. I guess, you could, as the other commenter suggests, mathematically prove that it can't happen, but otherwise you're prematurely closing it.

How do you differentiate that you solved the bug and not a similar looking bug?

  > the code can be changed to be more defensive and only ever delete the original when the new data has been successfully written and verified.
But this doesn't solve the problem.

  - What if it is an upstream issue? They have to be connected, since they are deleting data. Maybe it is completely a bug on their end? Doesn't matter how defensive you are if the bug was "anytime an email has 'man man' and is pulled between 00:00-00:04 everything deletes" then what can you do? 
  - What if the user was hacked and the hacker just deleted all the data?
  - What if the user was just dumb and deleted the data themselves. Either not knowingly or were embarrassed to say anything. 
  - What if it is another program on the user's computer that is deleting the data because of some weird unexpected collision?
I'm sure you can think of more situations that still won't solve the problem.

How do you close the report if you can not make strong guarantees that it is resolved?

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#279

Post by pseudalopex »

Davidbrcz wrote: post #250
nosioptar wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then all that'd apply to sites not having a dark theme, undercutting the author's point because he could just use stylus to.make his own dark theme for sites.

And if I understand you right, you completely miss the point of the article. I'm already resorting to tools and workarounds (ie Dark mode reader, invert image extensions, invert colors on phone). But - they are workarounds, cumbersome, and don't always work well. - I'm tech-savvy, if you are not and suffer the same condition, you are fucked. Builtin dark mode on websites and apps would just be net benefit for me for…

You understood them wrong I think. dangus seemed to suggest CSS manipulation tools were enough for people who wanted a light theme.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#280

Post by davidmurdoch »

Springtime wrote: post #248
davidmurdoch wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too think they should drop everything else and work on this bug. But an example of how these kinds of bugs are tricky: I have a similar bug at my job: Sometimes browsers delete our extension's database, or otherwise corrupt it. It's been an issue for years, but no one has been able to reproduce it. It's probably a 1 in 10 million bug. I think it's a hardware bug. My "fix" was to backup a small, but key, part of the…

> Sometimes browsers delete our extension's database ... but no one has been able to reproduce it. Are any of the bug reporters using Vivaldi? As for some reason that browser allows (and enables by default) clearing extension storage when clearing history/cookies via Delete Browsing Data . This is something the Stylus addon dev noted when a user was reporting the addon wasn't remembering their settings and it was bec…

"Delete" was an over simplification. The database seems to be there, but the data isn't. Dozens of engineers over the years have tried to find a way we could have accidentally cleared the data, but not the keys.

No user that has reported it has been willing to share their database with us (chrome stores it in a standard leveldb), as it contains private information.

But good to know that about Vivaldi! I didn't know that before, thanks!

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