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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 t

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_bug.cgi?id=462156 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156

thundarr 1y ago
Because it has to be reproducible. Help make it reproducible and show that to the developers.
- nehal3m 1y ago
  Hard to do when all your data is chilling in oblivion.
  - bestham 1y ago
    It doesn’t have to be reproduce with real data.
    - nehal3m 1y ago
      Then the developers can do it
      - PetitPrince 1y ago
        So you expect the developer to create data ex-nihilo for a bug they don't know how to trigger ?
        nehal3m 1y ago
        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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - thundarr 1y ago
    You can take snapshots of the VM with the mail server. When the bug happens, identify the snapshot. Bingo.
    - nehal3m 1y ago
      You’re assuming users affected by this bug have control over the VM running their mail server. I won’t argue that it can’t be done, but it’s probably harder than we think.
- CJefferson 1y ago
  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 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 would hope that's obvious, but someone just bothered to sent me a mean anonymous message)
  - bartread 1y ago
    I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this. That seems like a pretty frustrating bug when generalised to other word stems. It's also pretty standard to prioritise exact matches when ordering search results so, again, frustrating. One of my biggest bugbears with Microsoft Outlook has always been that its search function is terrible. If you can't find an email then it may as well not exist, and that's been a real problem on a regular basis during my career - particularly latterly when I was in leadership and necessarily lived in my email and calendar. It's disappointing that Thunderbird has similar issues with such a fundamental function.
  - _flux 1y ago
    Indeed most of the time I already know the exact word I'm looking for; and most of the time I get non-exact hits making it so much more difficult to find the actual message. Perhaps there could be an option to disable stemming completely from the inverted index, which would be probably easier to implement than a post-search filter (which in itself doesn't sound very complicated..). But of course, it's open source, anyone could contribute :D.
    - berkes 1y ago
      The search in thunderbird is terrible compared to what we are used to today. Same for k9 (now thunderbird for android?). Not only is the UX a horror, its results rely on all sorts of technicalities. I, as a software engineer, can understand that a mail has to be downloaded in entirety locally in order to have it indexed and then show up in the results. And I understand that sub-sub directories aren't really a thing in IMAP, so searching this-dir-and-everything below is hard/impossible and so on. But mostly the search algorithms are poor. So much so, that I often rely on (rip)grep to find mails. Or in a few occasions wrote a quick bash/python horror to push all my mail into a meilisearch instance and then use this search engine to get the lists and filters that I would expect thunderbird to have. Yes. It's open source. So "go fix it" is a proper reply. But that doesn't make a complaint about the state of the search feature invalid.
- BiteCode_dev 1y ago
  We don't know how to make it reproducible. What developers should do on such a critical and long standing issue is to offer an extension that victims can install to volunteer to track the bug. So they can click a button when things are fine to take a snapshot, and click another one when they encounter it. I would install that and be part of the solution.
  - bartread 1y ago
    If it was me running the project there's enough information in that thread to piece together an exploratory testing plan around the issue that might allow us to isolate it, and I'd set aside some time for the team to do that. Whilst obviously not lethal, this Thunderbird bug sort of reminds me of the Therac-25 incidents in the 1980s. Very occasionally the machine would give patients massive overdoses of radiation. This bug wasn't easy to reproduce (thankfully) and turned out to be due to a race condition. But of course, you can't find a problem if you don't investigate, and if it's a serious problem that's been documented then, as engineers, we can't just hide behind non-reproducibility as if it's some sort of magic shield. We have a responsibility to investigate and isolate the problem ourselves. If we don't do that we are effectively washing our hands of our own creations.
  - berkes 1y ago
    Not only that. Often mitigations can be placed even if the actual bug cannot be reproduced. Like many others in the thread suggested. I've encountered several impossible to reproduced bugs in the past. And what I (or my team) would then do, is re-architecture (refactor) some pieces of software so that we could reproduce it. Like e.g. better logging, specialized layers/adapters/services, simpler logic, and -above all- better testability.
- smokel 1y ago
  Nitpick: not all bugs have to be reproducible to be taken seriously. Defensive programming, and adding extra logging could be a mitigation to avoid future problems, or to help fixing them in the future.
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    Kinda off topic, but I've been searching for good introduction and best practises for defensive programming, but never really found much. Any recommendations?
    - smokel 1y ago
      This is something where modern chatbots will probably be very helpful. From the top of my head: 1. Validate input, expect all external input (both human and machine generated) to be completely bogus. 2. Fail fast and early. If something seems off, crash straight away, and do not expect things to magically repair itself at a later stage. 3. Use pre- and post-conditions where appropriate. I'm not sure about the exact definitions of defensive programming, but static type checking, and possibly unit testing, might also be part of it.
    - scott_w 1y ago
      I don’t know of any real posts on it, it just ends up being kind of a “assume it’ll go wrong,” then figure out how you know something has gone wrong and track it down. Your starting point is, after an issue is reported, add a load of logs around places that seem like candidates for the flow. Over time, you get a sense of where things can break and you add that telemetry ahead of time.
    - tstrimple 1y ago
      I feel like this is sort of like reading a book to get better at self defense. Yeah, you'll probably pick up a few interesting things that may be of questionable use. But when you train in martial arts, you often get to go through the motions and put the moves into practice. Even then "real" fights will feel quite different and a lot of the stuff you've learned will likely fly out the window. If you've been in real fights a lot, you've begun to internalize your training and your moves become more like instinct. It's quite difficult to go from book knowledge to instinct without getting beat up a lot in between I think. The real valuable lessons come from building something that breaks and getting to fix it yourself.
- jajko 1y ago
  No it doesn't. If I waited every time for obscure production issue to be reproduced in lower envs I would be fired... many times for clear and obvious incompetence. Sometimes, you can add some additional steps, logging, change behavior in corner case a bit, either to get more understanding next time it happens or even mitigate it. Sometimes, you have plenty of tools and ways to act. In my experience, that sometimes is basically always if one cares enough.
Nition 1y ago
Thanks for linking that. I've tried Thunderbird a couple of times in the past and quite liked it, but that thread has put me off using it forever. Even if the bug is fiendishly hard to track down and reproduce, you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they could add that would at least let it fail with an error message instead of actual data loss.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  See, you don't understand. Fixing the bug before reproducing it would violate the process.
  - jraph 1y ago
    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.
    - brookst 1y ago
      if (!user_requested_mass_delete && delete_requests_past_second > 10) throw(“we sure seem to be deleting a lot of stuff from the server”)
      - jraph 1y ago
        I would not want my email client to be relying on such brittle and incorrect heuristics. A better workaround would be to keep deleted emails around for some time so users have the option to restore them if the bug triggers. But this has drawbacks such as potential privacy breakage (you meant to delete mails you don't want the chance that anybody sees it) or free disk space management (your local drive is overloaded and you want to urgently free up space) or ux confusion (this is a de facto trash but Thunderbird already has such a feature) Ultimately, what needs to be done is make the code robust, make sure there are no race conditions, etc.
        1y ago
Jaxan 1y ago
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.
- BiteCode_dev 1y ago
  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.
  - atoav 1y ago
    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.
    - jraph 1y ago
      > I have been using TB on all operating systems with 8 or 9 users since 2006 and I never even once encountered this issue. Same but I never move my emails to local folders.
    - account42 1y ago
      > 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. As a software developer you should be able to reason about your code and work backwards from the observed result to investigate possible causes. When a plane crashes or bridge collapses the engineers tasked with finding the cause don't just throw up their hands if they can't make it happen again.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
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, but it certainly seems like the software designer's goal is to hurt the user. I obviously didn't want that to happen. There is no scenario where I would want that to happen. Email clients make some strange assumptions about what kind of actions make sense under what conditions.
- fouronnes3 1y ago
  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.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    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 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.
- berkes 1y ago
  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.
humanfromearth9 1y ago
[flagged]
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Which might hallucinate some more problems which doesn't exist in the first place?
  - Daneel_ 1y ago
    Or it might find it. You don't know until you try, but for a bug of this severity it's worth a shot!
- jl6 1y ago
  A useful use of AI might be to simulate thousands/millions of user sessions (via generating mouse and keyboard inputs), with instrumentation/logging switched on. Run them in various shapes of VMs until you hit the problem. Fuzz testing, basically.
jamespo 1y ago
It's amazing that thread seemed to take 5 years before someone mentioned their IMAP server and basic configuration info.
- account42 1y ago
  Most users don't administer their IMAP server or know much about it.
  - jamespo 1y ago
    Technical users reporting bugs like this with a mail client should endeavour to find out if they are serious about the issue. The initial reporter worked for Sun Microsystems.
globular-toast 1y ago
Hopefully this prompted you to check your backups?
- fouronnes3 1y ago
  Can't even make a backup in the first place if they get deleted while you download them from gmail.
  - RandomBacon 1y ago
    It bypassed Gmail's trash folder?
    - fouronnes3 1y ago
      Yup. "Move to trash" is a gmail thing, Thunderbird "move" uses IMAP directly.
- account42 1y ago
  Backups should not be your first lone of defense.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
I do hope that Thunderbird really fixes this issue really. It really is just bad rep and like the severity of this is pretty bad. Email is a really critical protocol so even if this is happening to only some people, it should still be fixed asap.
kgwxd 1y ago
Yikes! I recently tried Thunderbird again because I was annoyed with gmail pushing AI subscription crap in the web UI. Guess I'll take that over this bug for now.
davidmurdoch 1y ago
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 database to a separate storage mechanism browsers let us access. When the issue arises we can now try to detect the missing data and restore part of the db. BUT! If this is actually a hardware bug, there is a chance that this additional database write will cause this big to occur even more often, as we now have to write to storage twice as often!
- Springtime 1y ago
  > 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 because the user had unwittingly wiped the extension storage due to the browser defaults. (I actually use Vivaldi myself but virtually never use that feature so was unaware of the behavior until reading about the bug report)
  - davidmurdoch 1y ago
    "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!
__turbobrew__ 1y ago
6 years between the initial bug report and someone from mozilla joining the thread, wow.
sosborn 1y ago
I got bit by this a long time ago. Will never trust Thunderbird again.
miles 1y ago
> On a several occasions (most recently today), Thunderbird has "lost" my mail messages that are in my inbox when I move them to a local folder. Effectively it corrupts the messages - they appear in the local folder as 1 KB messages with no subject or sender info. They are empty messages. Apple's Mail app has had a virtually identical bug since Catalina; Michael Tsai's article on the issue currently has 636 comments: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-10-15/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1... After witnessing the bug myself, migrated to Thunderbird with Maildir enabled[1] for long-term storage; have yet to experience the issue despite a large database (>300,000 emails) and daily IMAP import to local folders. [1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_maildir.html https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m...
Insanity 1y ago
I was a thunderbird user many years ago. Seeing the article made me want to reinstall, and then this comment instantly changed my mind. Insane bug for an email client to have…
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
krunck 1y ago
I've been using TB for personal and work since it's first day and never hit the bug. I've never known any co-workers to hit the bug. I'm sure plenty of other software that we use every day has similar severe bugs that occur just as infrequently. I'll keep using TB. I'll also make sure to look both ways when crossing streets and won't assume that cars are going to stop for red lights because my chance of getting hit crossing a street is more likely than getting hit by this bug.
godelski 1y ago
I'm rather surprised by the comments responding to this. A bit by the comment itself. Why I'm surprised is... well... this is HN. We know that a bug like this is very rare, right? I mean otherwise who would ever use TB, right? But if it's rare, it's really hard to track down. There years of comments without people including system information. The reproduction steps themselves are "sometimes." It's HN, so we can assume users here program, right? How would you solve this use? FWIW, I've used TB on Linux and OSX for years and never faced an issue like this. The only one I've faced is sometimes not being able to connect to the server and having to resend an email. On the other hand, when using Apple Mail: - messages routinely doesn't show me messages I can see in TB. - Frequently sending messages from my phone doesn't go through or ends up double sending. - Searching will pull up emails from a year ago, prioritizing them over the email I got this week and was actually looking for (e.g. searching foo@bar.com). - I can't even tag emails!?!? - Do filters even work? Holy cow how do people live without filters!? How do you deal with spam? How do you deal with all those noisy needless messages and newsletter type of stuff that won't let you unsubscribe or comes from domains or addresses you can't block because emails you need come from the same addresses? - It straight up renders PDFs inline with no warning, helping spammers. - There's no folders and everything is just all jumbled together in a mess. How does anyone find anything? Idk, this is an annoying problem but I'd be surprised if I lost all my emails. I can recover deleted emails in Gmail and Outlook. Annoying, but recovering these (go to trash, click "restore") is far less time than what I'm saving on a weekly basis with TB. I know these problems aren't on all platforms but TB IME has saved me a ton of time compared to using Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail. Hell, fucking Neomutt is a better experience than those three, which is insane. Trying to use them is like trying to use the internet without an ad blocker. How are we so bad at email?
ahofmann 1y ago
Oh, wow. When I have to use Thunderbird, I never move emails. I manually copy emails to a folder and delete the emails from the old folder after that. I forgot why I have to do this. Now I know again. A lot of people here are speculating that this bug must be very rare. I maintained like 30 Thunderbird installations for other people. This bug bit me at least twice. It can't be that rare.

thundarr 1y ago

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

nehal3m 1y ago
Hard to do when all your data is chilling in oblivion.
- bestham 1y ago
  It doesn’t have to be reproduce with real data.
  - nehal3m 1y ago
    Then the developers can do it
    - PetitPrince 1y ago
      So you expect the developer to create data ex-nihilo for a bug they don't know how to trigger ?
      - nehal3m 1y ago
        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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- thundarr 1y ago
  You can take snapshots of the VM with the mail server. When the bug happens, identify the snapshot. Bingo.
  - nehal3m 1y ago
    You’re assuming users affected by this bug have control over the VM running their mail server. I won’t argue that it can’t be done, but it’s probably harder than we think.
CJefferson 1y ago
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 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 would hope that's obvious, but someone just bothered to sent me a mean anonymous message)
- bartread 1y ago
  I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this. That seems like a pretty frustrating bug when generalised to other word stems. It's also pretty standard to prioritise exact matches when ordering search results so, again, frustrating. One of my biggest bugbears with Microsoft Outlook has always been that its search function is terrible. If you can't find an email then it may as well not exist, and that's been a real problem on a regular basis during my career - particularly latterly when I was in leadership and necessarily lived in my email and calendar. It's disappointing that Thunderbird has similar issues with such a fundamental function.
- _flux 1y ago
  Indeed most of the time I already know the exact word I'm looking for; and most of the time I get non-exact hits making it so much more difficult to find the actual message. Perhaps there could be an option to disable stemming completely from the inverted index, which would be probably easier to implement than a post-search filter (which in itself doesn't sound very complicated..). But of course, it's open source, anyone could contribute :D.
  - berkes 1y ago
    The search in thunderbird is terrible compared to what we are used to today. Same for k9 (now thunderbird for android?). Not only is the UX a horror, its results rely on all sorts of technicalities. I, as a software engineer, can understand that a mail has to be downloaded in entirety locally in order to have it indexed and then show up in the results. And I understand that sub-sub directories aren't really a thing in IMAP, so searching this-dir-and-everything below is hard/impossible and so on. But mostly the search algorithms are poor. So much so, that I often rely on (rip)grep to find mails. Or in a few occasions wrote a quick bash/python horror to push all my mail into a meilisearch instance and then use this search engine to get the lists and filters that I would expect thunderbird to have. Yes. It's open source. So "go fix it" is a proper reply. But that doesn't make a complaint about the state of the search feature invalid.
BiteCode_dev 1y ago
We don't know how to make it reproducible. What developers should do on such a critical and long standing issue is to offer an extension that victims can install to volunteer to track the bug. So they can click a button when things are fine to take a snapshot, and click another one when they encounter it. I would install that and be part of the solution.
- bartread 1y ago
  If it was me running the project there's enough information in that thread to piece together an exploratory testing plan around the issue that might allow us to isolate it, and I'd set aside some time for the team to do that. Whilst obviously not lethal, this Thunderbird bug sort of reminds me of the Therac-25 incidents in the 1980s. Very occasionally the machine would give patients massive overdoses of radiation. This bug wasn't easy to reproduce (thankfully) and turned out to be due to a race condition. But of course, you can't find a problem if you don't investigate, and if it's a serious problem that's been documented then, as engineers, we can't just hide behind non-reproducibility as if it's some sort of magic shield. We have a responsibility to investigate and isolate the problem ourselves. If we don't do that we are effectively washing our hands of our own creations.
- berkes 1y ago
  Not only that. Often mitigations can be placed even if the actual bug cannot be reproduced. Like many others in the thread suggested. I've encountered several impossible to reproduced bugs in the past. And what I (or my team) would then do, is re-architecture (refactor) some pieces of software so that we could reproduce it. Like e.g. better logging, specialized layers/adapters/services, simpler logic, and -above all- better testability.
smokel 1y ago
Nitpick: not all bugs have to be reproducible to be taken seriously. Defensive programming, and adding extra logging could be a mitigation to avoid future problems, or to help fixing them in the future.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  Kinda off topic, but I've been searching for good introduction and best practises for defensive programming, but never really found much. Any recommendations?
  - smokel 1y ago
    This is something where modern chatbots will probably be very helpful. From the top of my head: 1. Validate input, expect all external input (both human and machine generated) to be completely bogus. 2. Fail fast and early. If something seems off, crash straight away, and do not expect things to magically repair itself at a later stage. 3. Use pre- and post-conditions where appropriate. I'm not sure about the exact definitions of defensive programming, but static type checking, and possibly unit testing, might also be part of it.
  - scott_w 1y ago
    I don’t know of any real posts on it, it just ends up being kind of a “assume it’ll go wrong,” then figure out how you know something has gone wrong and track it down. Your starting point is, after an issue is reported, add a load of logs around places that seem like candidates for the flow. Over time, you get a sense of where things can break and you add that telemetry ahead of time.
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    I feel like this is sort of like reading a book to get better at self defense. Yeah, you'll probably pick up a few interesting things that may be of questionable use. But when you train in martial arts, you often get to go through the motions and put the moves into practice. Even then "real" fights will feel quite different and a lot of the stuff you've learned will likely fly out the window. If you've been in real fights a lot, you've begun to internalize your training and your moves become more like instinct. It's quite difficult to go from book knowledge to instinct without getting beat up a lot in between I think. The real valuable lessons come from building something that breaks and getting to fix it yourself.
jajko 1y ago
No it doesn't. If I waited every time for obscure production issue to be reproduced in lower envs I would be fired... many times for clear and obvious incompetence. Sometimes, you can add some additional steps, logging, change behavior in corner case a bit, either to get more understanding next time it happens or even mitigate it. Sometimes, you have plenty of tools and ways to act. In my experience, that sometimes is basically always if one cares enough.

Nition 1y ago

Thanks for linking that. I've tried Thunderbird a couple of times in the past and quite liked it, but that thread has put me off using it forever. Even if the bug is fiendishly hard to track down and reproduce, you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they could add that would at least let it fail with an error message instead of actual data loss.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
See, you don't understand. Fixing the bug before reproducing it would violate the process.
- jraph 1y ago
  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.
  - brookst 1y ago
    if (!user_requested_mass_delete && delete_requests_past_second > 10) throw(“we sure seem to be deleting a lot of stuff from the server”)
    - jraph 1y ago
      I would not want my email client to be relying on such brittle and incorrect heuristics. A better workaround would be to keep deleted emails around for some time so users have the option to restore them if the bug triggers. But this has drawbacks such as potential privacy breakage (you meant to delete mails you don't want the chance that anybody sees it) or free disk space management (your local drive is overloaded and you want to urgently free up space) or ux confusion (this is a de facto trash but Thunderbird already has such a feature) Ultimately, what needs to be done is make the code robust, make sure there are no race conditions, etc.
      - 1y ago

Jaxan 1y ago

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.

BiteCode_dev 1y ago
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.
- atoav 1y ago
  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.
  - jraph 1y ago
    > I have been using TB on all operating systems with 8 or 9 users since 2006 and I never even once encountered this issue. Same but I never move my emails to local folders.
  - account42 1y ago
    > 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. As a software developer you should be able to reason about your code and work backwards from the observed result to investigate possible causes. When a plane crashes or bridge collapses the engineers tasked with finding the cause don't just throw up their hands if they can't make it happen again.

thaumasiotes 1y ago

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, but it certainly seems like the software designer's goal is to hurt the user. I obviously didn't want that to happen. There is no scenario where I would want that to happen. Email clients make some strange assumptions about what kind of actions make sense under what conditions.

fouronnes3 1y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  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 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.
berkes 1y ago
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.

humanfromearth9 1y ago

[flagged]

bayindirh 1y ago
Which might hallucinate some more problems which doesn't exist in the first place?
- Daneel_ 1y ago
  Or it might find it. You don't know until you try, but for a bug of this severity it's worth a shot!
jl6 1y ago
A useful use of AI might be to simulate thousands/millions of user sessions (via generating mouse and keyboard inputs), with instrumentation/logging switched on. Run them in various shapes of VMs until you hit the problem. Fuzz testing, basically.

jamespo 1y ago

It's amazing that thread seemed to take 5 years before someone mentioned their IMAP server and basic configuration info.

account42 1y ago
Most users don't administer their IMAP server or know much about it.
- jamespo 1y ago
  Technical users reporting bugs like this with a mail client should endeavour to find out if they are serious about the issue. The initial reporter worked for Sun Microsystems.

globular-toast 1y ago

Hopefully this prompted you to check your backups?

fouronnes3 1y ago
Can't even make a backup in the first place if they get deleted while you download them from gmail.
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  It bypassed Gmail's trash folder?
  - fouronnes3 1y ago
    Yup. "Move to trash" is a gmail thing, Thunderbird "move" uses IMAP directly.
account42 1y ago
Backups should not be your first lone of defense.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

I do hope that Thunderbird really fixes this issue really. It really is just bad rep and like the severity of this is pretty bad. Email is a really critical protocol so even if this is happening to only some people, it should still be fixed asap.

kgwxd 1y ago

Yikes! I recently tried Thunderbird again because I was annoyed with gmail pushing AI subscription crap in the web UI. Guess I'll take that over this bug for now.

davidmurdoch 1y ago

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 database to a separate storage mechanism browsers let us access. When the issue arises we can now try to detect the missing data and restore part of the db. BUT! If this is actually a hardware bug, there is a chance that this additional database write will cause this big to occur even more often, as we now have to write to storage twice as often!

Springtime 1y ago
> 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 because the user had unwittingly wiped the extension storage due to the browser defaults. (I actually use Vivaldi myself but virtually never use that feature so was unaware of the behavior until reading about the bug report)
- davidmurdoch 1y ago
  "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!

__turbobrew__ 1y ago

6 years between the initial bug report and someone from mozilla joining the thread, wow.

sosborn 1y ago

I got bit by this a long time ago. Will never trust Thunderbird again.

miles 1y ago

> On a several occasions (most recently today), Thunderbird has "lost" my mail messages that are in my inbox when I move them to a local folder. Effectively it corrupts the messages - they appear in the local folder as 1 KB messages with no subject or sender info. They are empty messages. Apple's Mail app has had a virtually identical bug since Catalina; Michael Tsai's article on the issue currently has 636 comments: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-10-15/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1... After witnessing the bug myself, migrated to Thunderbird with Maildir enabled[1] for long-term storage; have yet to experience the issue despite a large database (>300,000 emails) and daily IMAP import to local folders. [1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_maildir.html https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m...

Insanity 1y ago

I was a thunderbird user many years ago. Seeing the article made me want to reinstall, and then this comment instantly changed my mind. Insane bug for an email client to have…

deleted 1y ago
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krunck 1y ago

I've been using TB for personal and work since it's first day and never hit the bug. I've never known any co-workers to hit the bug. I'm sure plenty of other software that we use every day has similar severe bugs that occur just as infrequently. I'll keep using TB. I'll also make sure to look both ways when crossing streets and won't assume that cars are going to stop for red lights because my chance of getting hit crossing a street is more likely than getting hit by this bug.

godelski 1y ago

I'm rather surprised by the comments responding to this. A bit by the comment itself. Why I'm surprised is... well... this is HN. We know that a bug like this is very rare, right? I mean otherwise who would ever use TB, right? But if it's rare, it's really hard to track down. There years of comments without people including system information. The reproduction steps themselves are "sometimes." It's HN, so we can assume users here program, right? How would you solve this use? FWIW, I've used TB on Linux and OSX for years and never faced an issue like this. The only one I've faced is sometimes not being able to connect to the server and having to resend an email. On the other hand, when using Apple Mail: - messages routinely doesn't show me messages I can see in TB. - Frequently sending messages from my phone doesn't go through or ends up double sending. - Searching will pull up emails from a year ago, prioritizing them over the email I got this week and was actually looking for (e.g. searching foo@bar.com). - I can't even tag emails!?!? - Do filters even work? Holy cow how do people live without filters!? How do you deal with spam? How do you deal with all those noisy needless messages and newsletter type of stuff that won't let you unsubscribe or comes from domains or addresses you can't block because emails you need come from the same addresses? - It straight up renders PDFs inline with no warning, helping spammers. - There's no folders and everything is just all jumbled together in a mess. How does anyone find anything? Idk, this is an annoying problem but I'd be surprised if I lost all my emails. I can recover deleted emails in Gmail and Outlook. Annoying, but recovering these (go to trash, click "restore") is far less time than what I'm saving on a weekly basis with TB. I know these problems aren't on all platforms but TB IME has saved me a ton of time compared to using Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail. Hell, fucking Neomutt is a better experience than those three, which is insane. Trying to use them is like trying to use the internet without an ad blocker. How are we so bad at email?

ahofmann 1y ago

Oh, wow. When I have to use Thunderbird, I never move emails. I manually copy emails to a folder and delete the emails from the old folder after that. I forgot why I have to do this. Now I know again. A lot of people here are speculating that this bug must be very rare. I maintained like 30 Thunderbird installations for other people. This bug bit me at least twice. It can't be that rare.