[thaumasiotes]

> But it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't reproduce and have no clue why it might be happening.

No, not at all. It's very easy.

This bug involves taking an inappropriate action under corrupted conditions. You don't need to know how those conditions arose. All you have to do is check whether they currently obtain, and - if so - refrain from taking the inappropriate action.

For this bug, that looks like this:

1. When we're executing a "move"...

2. Before deleting the original messages...

3. Check whether the copies are identical to the originals...

4. And if not, delete the copies instead of the originals.

At this point, the bug can't occur. The "root cause" bug, where your buggy logic says that you copied a bunch of messages even though you didn't, can still occur, but it can no longer delete any messages.

[nativeit]

So…do it. Sounds like it’d make a great case study that would get a person tons of attention and praise on HN, a real feather to put in one’s cap.

Literally nothing stopping anyone in this thread from opening a PR with this reportedly “very easy” fix that’s eluded developers for nearly two decades, 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?) and/or Gmail and Outlook are implicitly trustworthy?

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

[jazzyjackson]

Thunderbird stores mail locally on disk.

If you're keeping backups of your disk, then this bug is not unrecoverable.

[1718627440]

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

[mixmastamyk]

Did a developer ever try? Reading the issue, found only one person asking for test cases and trying to close it.

[thaumasiotes]

One of the many comments on the issue notes that although the bug has reoccurred in every version of Windows, it might not get much attention from developers because it is catalogued as something specific to Windows XP.

Nobody in the intervening nine years followed up by updating the bug's metadata, though. It's still "Windows XP only".

[Forgeties79]

I try to never underestimate the incompetence/lack of concern people can have when it comes to addressing major product issues, but if this has been open for 17 years and is so widely known, somebody has surely looked into it and determined it’s not so easy.

[redeeman]

and then they simultaneously determined "yeah, we might eat your data. Lets not warn anyone about that AT ALL, lets keep the feature activated and let them users lose their data". This behavior ought to be criminal.

[godelski]

  > Lets not warn anyone about that AT ALL, lets keep the feature activated and let them users lose their data

How did you conclude this?

IDK why the assumption is that safety measures haven't been created. You wouldn't mark the bug as resolved if you put in safety features, right? You *ONLY MARK AS RESOLVED* after reproducing the bug and *VERIFYING* that it won't happen again. Right? Dear god I hope this is what you do, because otherwise you are prematurely closing bugs.

[autoexec]

I'd agree with you that the fact that the bug is still open after 17 years isn't the problem, but the issue is that people are still (as of 10 months ago) running into the issue of their mail being deleted. If they'd secretly implemented "safety measures" as you suggest that wouldn't be happening.

Looking at the timeline, it's possible that they've addressed a few of the bugs that result in data loss several years ago, and it's possible that the latest guy who ran into the problem within the last year triggered it in new ways or under new conditions but it's clear that the problem of thunderbird deleting messages from the server when copies haven't successfully been saved during a move operation wasn't solved by any "safety measures" 9 months ago and it's doubtful that it's been solved now.

My guess is that because thunderbird ultimately doesn't bother to make sure that messages are successfully and accurately copied before it removes them from the server it'll only be a matter of time before someone else stumbles on some other set of circumstances which results in data loss when messages are being moved.

[godelski]

Reading the bug report it is unclear to me if the newest one is the same bug. There are also other bugs referenced that look to be fixed.

  > If they'd secretly implemented "safety measures" as you suggest that wouldn't be happening.

But we can *VERIFY* that measures were taken. In fact, easily! We can look at the references at the very top of the bug report!

  - Title: move/copying multiple imap messages to local folder bypasses offline store and redownloads messages. Need to preflight the move/copy.
    Status: RESOLVED FIXED 
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505456

There are others that need to be hunted for but this one was trivial to find and was implemented pretty quickly. There are also other similar bugs that weren't marked as dupes. Some of these have been marked as resolved and fixed. That leads me to believe that they just don't know what exactly this bug is because they can't reproduce. It may very well have been resolved and new issues might be completely new bugs. I mean... it has been 17 years... and TB has undergone significant rewriting. Don't you think that the software changed quite a bit in that time?

Which all I'm trying to argue is that they didn't just sit on their asses and do nothing for 17 years

[thaumasiotes]

> But we can *VERIFY* that measures were taken. In fact, easily! We can look at the references at the very top of the bug report!

>> Title: move/copying multiple imap messages to local folder bypasses offline store and redownloads messages. Need to preflight the move/copy.

>> Status: RESOLVED FIXED

This might be a more compelling observation if the bug was related to data loss. This just says "if you have a local copy of something, read from that instead of reading from the remote server".

It addresses the specific observation made in the thread that you can encounter the data loss bug even if you already have local copies of the messages, because Thunderbird ignores those, redownloads from the server, fails, and then deletes everything. Now, if you have local copies, Thunderbird won't try to redownload them from the server and the fact that the data loss bug isn't fixed won't matter to you.

You could apply this same approach to the entire bug, by guarding the "delete all of the user's emails" action instead of the "move emails that already exist locally" action. But they don't.

[redeeman]

are you being for real? did you see anything as such in the bug listing? but even IF they did put safeguards in place, the fact that this is SEVENTEEN YEARS, no warning, functionality still enabled without ANY WARNING losing people data. unforgivable.

How can you possibly justify this behavior? I understand they dont owe the world any software, fine, but dont knowingly publish stuff that KILLS PEOPLES DATA without atleast a warning

[godelski]

  > are you being for real?

Yes

  > did you see anything as such in the bug listing?

Yes

  > but even IF they did put safeguards in place, the fact that this is SEVENTEEN YEARS, no warning, functionality still enabled without ANY WARNING losing people data. unforgivable.

The software has change a ton in 17 years. Right? We can agree on this? (I mean it underwent a major revision in 2018, getting a lot of the codebase rewritten (like Firefox Quantum).

So let's consider a hypothetical situation. Suppose the problem was resolved in the almost 2 decades of rewriting BUT you still do not know what caused the bug in the first place and, consequently, can't reproduce it.

Do you mark the bug as resolved?

Now let's not sit in the hypothetical setting and act as developers. Some safeguards have been put in place (you can verify by looking at referenced issues). You've solved similar, but are unable to determine if these are the same problems or different problems (again, see referenced or use the search).

Do you mark the bug as resolved?

Your sibling commenter implied they would. Personally, I wouldn't. Marking as resolved is a promise to the user that it is fixed. But I can't make such a promise. I can't make any strong statement until I can reproduce. So yeah, it seems appropriate to me that it is marked as "unresolved" with steps "needs reproduction." That is an entirely appropriate status to me. You try as hard as you can and you implement as many safety features as you can, but you don't mark as resolved until you can verify. Unfortunately, this means issues go stale. Hell, there'll even be some noise like if a hacker or even just your dog deleted everything. We wouldn't want to assume the user is dumb and lull ourselves into a false sense of security, right? But you can only do so much.

*YOU CANNOT CLOSE A BUG REPORT IF YOU CANNOT VERIFY THE BUG*. That's the policy they are using. You may use a different policy, but that's the one they are using.

[redeeman]

> YOU CANNOT CLOSE A BUG REPORT IF YOU CANNOT VERIFY THE BUG. That's the policy they are using. You may use a different policy, but that's the one they are using.

and then I would say: YOU DO NOT STOP WARNING PEOPLE UNLESS YOU CAN VERIFY ITS FIXED

(which ofc assume you bothered warning people to begin with)

[Forgeties79]

Make no mistake - I am not absolving them of leaving this issue unaddressed lol just saying if it was easy they’d likely have handled it. It’s probably difficult or they just don’t know, so they keep putting it off and decided that not enough users are affected for real consequences (which is wrong to do)

[redeeman]

i fully understand it might be very hard to fix, but to know about it for that long, and not warn people or disable the functionality is unforgivable

[Forgeties79]

Totally agree

[yifanl]

It's not criminal, but you're entitled to a full refund of Thunderbird in the event it happens.

[CamperBob2]

This line of reasoning will eventually cause it to be treated as criminal, or at least as a civil tort. Then we will all be worse off.

[account42]

Neither lack of payment nor the liability disclaimers in the license absolve the developers of liability for malicious actions or gross negligence.

[saurik]

Just because something is free certainly does not make it ethical, and it doesn't even mean it should be legal.

[yifanl]

No, but they're rather limited in ways to reimburse you or offer "justice". Putting the Thunderbird team in jail doesn't help you out.

Hell, what if the offending commit was 2 decades ago by someone who's cut off all contact regarding code since?

[redeeman]

nobody should fault the person who have coded the bug, unless someone can prove it was done on purpose. What I am suggesting is that the project as a whole has the responsibility to not just sit on data losing bugs for 17 years without warning users.

the fact that they choose not to, makes me perfectly OK with them being held criminally liable.

[redeeman]

an option I will be making use of now.

And I know its not criminal, im saying it SHOULD be criminal not to warn people about this. its more than a decade