Bug: Unified Folders disappear
Status: RESOLVED
Priority: --
Resolution: DUPLICATE
Created: 2024-09-12 21:27:50+00:00
Resolved: 2024-11-13 16:06:40+00:00

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:130.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/130.0

Steps to reproduce:

Start Thunderbird 128.2.0esr (64-bit), expecting to see Unified Folders displayed as on the previous use of TB128.2.0.esr.


Actual results:

No folders view, no email list, no message view, Today pane is slow to fill with calendar data.


Expected results:

Unified Folders view should have displayed normally.

Background:  I have two computers with Thunderbird installed on them.  One is Windows 11 Home, the other is Windows 10 Home.  The Windows 11 computer had 5GB of locally stored email on TB115.  When I was forced to update to TV128, all my email and calendar data disappeared from view!  Three TB instances running, with one instance using a lot of CPU, and its memory use kept increasing to over 5GB, and TB was not responding, even after several hours.

I saved a copy of the active profile on the Windows 11 computer, uninstalled Thunderbird, and deleted all Thunderbird related files and folders that were left behind in the \Users\[username]\AppData folder.  Then I reinstalled TB128, reconfigured all of my email and calendar accounts, shutdown TB, copied the saved profile folder back, restarted TB, adjusted the local folders for each account to the old profile folder, and turned Unified Folders back on.  That seemed to work for most of the email, although some data was lost, and the local calendar data seems to be gone forever.  So far, so-so good with Unified Folders on that computer.

On the Windows 10 computer, it is just for travel use, and I don't store email on it, all accounts are set to leave email on the POP servers.  With that computer, I just wiped everything out, installed a fresh copy of TB128, and set up the 2 POP accounts and 1 IMAP account that I was interested in checking while I am out.  Unified Folders was working fine on that computer for about one week.  

Today, I started TB up on the Windows 10 computer, and there was no folder view, no message list view, and no message view.  The Today calendar pane displayed, slowly, but eventually filled in after about a minute.  Email seemed to be downloading normally according to the status line.  The View>>Folders menu had everything unchecked. Checkmarking any folder view but Unified worked fine.  Unified could be checked, but nothing would change in the folders pane.  If I unchecked any of the other views, Unified would automatically be unchecked too, and the could not be reselected, because the menu item would grey-out.  Checkmarking anything folder view but Unified would work, Unified would then no longer be greyed-out, and it could be checked.  But again, Unified folders would not display in the folder pane, and if you close the menu and come back to it, Unified would be unchecked again, athough not greyed-out.

I saw these two bugs...
bug 1858695
bug 1856997

So I shutdown TB, moved the "smart mailboxes" folder out of the profile, and restarted, and Unified Folders worked again.  Looking at the profile folder, I see there is a new "smart mailboxes" folder there.  So TB seems to have reconstructed them.

I'm thinking something is corrupting "smart mailboxes" folder, possibly the compact folders feature.  I say that just because it seems to be something that acts on the mail folders from time to time, but I have no direct evidence that it is the cause.