Closed Bug 11895 Opened 25 years ago Closed 25 years ago

POP3 mail downloads duplicates

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Networking, defect, P3)

x86
Windows NT

Tracking

(Not tracked)

VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: momoi, Assigned: mscott)

Details

** Observed with 8/13/99 Win32 build ** ** This problem has been there for the past week or so ** ** I'll be happy to create an accont on my server if you want to see the problem on it. Let me know. ** I use NS 3.5x server as a POP3 test server. I have about 250 msgs in the Inbox. 1. I send 1-2 new msgs to this server's account. 2. Now after going through a comple maneuver with the password, and several minutes of waiting,mail finally downloads, 3. But it downloads all the old msgs + the 2 new ones! I thought we got rid of this problem. Note: I also would like to add that because it ie virtually impossible to get through te pasword dialog prompt without hanging,I may be inadvertantly doing something to cause this. Here's what I do to det mail from this server: 1. Start Mail. 2. Select the POP3 server icon. 3. Press "Get Msg" 4. When the dialog comes up, I supply the correct password but then press Cancel to avoid the problem mentioned in Bug 11470. 5. Then, I press "Get Msg" button again.I supply the correct password again but this time, I press OK. --> BTW, why am I asked to supply the password when I already have one specified in the prefs.js file? --> I'll file another bug. 6. Now an interminable wait -- but eventually (unless it hangs), mail is downloaded but I get all the previous msgs + a few news ones.
I have additional information. Let me list them in an itemized fashion. 1. This problem seems to occur when POP mail download hangs a few times for one reason or another and corrupts something in the Inbox.msf or popstate.dat files. 2. I have had a number of hang problems -- particularly when I inadvertantly pressed "Get Msgs" button while the mail progress bar (lower-left) is in motion. 3. I was able to to avoid this problem when I threw away the existing Inbox, Inbox.msf and popstate.dat files and start anew. So,the current status of this bugs is this: It seems that when I filed this bug originally, I had not downloaded POP msgs for several days. For some reason I don't understand, I had difficulty in stopping "in-progress" to be not in motion. When I then pressed "Get msgs" button, the apprunner froze. I ran into this problem a few times and then finally I succeeded in downloading msgs but I got the duplicate msgs also. So my question is: Don't we have an ability to correct either 'corrupt' or non-up-todate summary or popstate.dat file as we communicate with a POP3 server?
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Target Milestone: M10
This sounds bad. M10. My suspicion is that we are accessing the popstate.dat file during hte first get new message. Then you are trying it again before the first instance finishes and we try to access the file again. Corruption ensues....
QA Contact: lchiang → esther
Okay, there are two things that I think need to be done here. I'm going to fix one of them in this bug report and I'm going to file a new bug on the other problem because it is more involved and effects more than just downloading new mail. 1) I need to prevent us from downloading new mail if we are already in the process of downloading new mail for the server. I think part of the corruption Kat saw was due to two separate pop3 protocol instances accessing pop3state.dat at the same time. I've fixed this problem by marking the server as busy when we are downloading new messages. Subsequent clicks on GetNewMsgs for pop won't do anything until the first get new messages operation is complete. The second problem is more severe and I'll file a new bug for this one: 2) In 4.5 we had locks on each berkley mail folder. These locks prevented multiple instances of the code from reading/writing into the same berkley mail folder at the same time. We need to port this code into 5.0 as we don't have it right now. Without this code, it is possible to run into the following scenario: downloading new mail for a pop account which involves writing the messages into your berkley mail folder (your inbox) At the same time, you try to display a message in your inbox. This involves reading out of the same file we are trying to write new messages into. Bad things can happen in this scenario. This may also have occurred to Kat. But (1) is now fixed and that's what I'm going to use this bug for. I'll create a new one for (2) and add Kat to it.
Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 25 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Using 19990908 builds on Mac Linux, and Win98 this is fixed. I had only 3 messsges in my inbox, did a Get Msg. No additional messages were downloaded. I sent a new message then did a Get Msg again. Only the new message was downloaded. This is to verify #1 is fixed, as scott mentioned #2 is a different bug.
Product: MailNews → Core
Product: Core → MailNews Core
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