From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011221 BuildID: 2001122106 moving large amounts of mail from one folder to another is very broken in numerous ways: data gets lost or is doubled, the application hangs or gives no feedback, the given feedback is misleading, and essential features like locking the mailbox or checking for disk space are missing. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. move a large amount of mail (like 1,000 messages, but can be less) from one folder to another, either via drag and drop or via right click and move to. 2. if everything works fine, repeat step 1. Actual Results: the following problems appear (not necessarily in this order): - moving messages is sometimes fast and sometimes very slow - in the meantime, the text "moving message..." at the bottom bar sometimes appears, sometimes does not appear at all, sometimes hangs after a certain number of messages and sometimes disappears when the application tries to receive new mail (indicating that the mailbox is not locked like it is when building summary files) - at the same time, the selected messages sometimes disappear one by one, but sometimes do not - in this case they can be deselected, reselected, moved again, moved elsewhere etc (without any feedback indication what the application is actually doing) - the messages will sometimes be moved, sometimes not be touched at all, sometimes be copied (i.e. not deleted, which is almost impossible to detect since the number of messages displayed for both folders does not change at all) and sometimes be lost (especially if there is not enough disk space, which shouldn't affect a _move_ operation) - in some cases, the application will simply freeze - restarting the application sometimes resets its behaviour to normal (for one or more move operations), but more often does not Expected Results: NONE of the above, or a WARNING MESSAGE asking me to backup my mailbox before moving more than 100 messages moving a large amount of mail from a to b should not be considered extravagant. it is a basic feature of any mail client, and an essential one for a mail client that regularly has to rebuild mail folders and thus becomes almost unusuable once the folders have reached a critial size (~10,000 messages). the behaviour of the application adds to the feeling (which was common before ~0.9.2 and got more common again since ~0.9.5) that mozilla mail/news (even with enough disk space and ram) is not a safe place for your mail and has to be used with extreme caution, especially because user input often leads to delayed or no feedback and the mail folders' display often does not correspond with their real content - which is both an actual and a psychological blocker for the whole application.

A major rewrite of move/copy code is due and could happen in next few milestones. Is this imap, local, nntp or have you seen this behvaior for all three protocols.

it's a pop account (and all operations were local, of course)

add to the list of problems: - messages are sometimes complete and sometimes corrupted: only a part of the message, the same part of the message repeated or two different messages mixed - the number of messages figure for the destination folder can be very misleading (apart from stay the same when it should change): in at least one case, moving 12 messages to the trash folder lead to an increase of roughly 8,000 messages

Navin, I think this is a dup of bug 113553 in general. Although, this bug has a good summary of all the problems relating to moving large mails. But we do have different bugs for each issue mentioned here. I am not marking it a dup because you confirmed this bug and I am not sure how you feel this is different from the ones we already have for moving mail messages. I will let you decide.

bug 113553 is about just one case where we cannot delete message. This bug is more in general about reliability of move/copy. It may be helpful if you can also reproduce what the reporter is seeing. I can imagine stopping move/copy may not work smoothly but in general move/copy should work ok.

note that the msg selected in the list is not the msg displayed...perhaps related to filtering or compaction? also note the build: 1.1beta...

I just got bitten by this bug while testing nightly build 2002082008. I was checking some table rendering issues and downloaded the latest nightly build to check against. I didn't attempt to move a large amount of mail. I opened the browser and selected preferences and then cleared the history and the cache. I then launched Mail and was immediately prompted by the account wizzard to add a new account. Interestingly all my mail accounts and newsgroups were gone (2 news accounts, 2 pop accounts). When I checked the mail data files I could see data for mail records in the Inbox, Sent and trash. I attempted to move over the Inbox data file to a new account I created and Mail hung. Nothing worked and I lost all my accounts. My backup was too old to recover from so I have been reduced to picking data of the files using a text editor. ug.

Please do not set + on flags unless you are a driver. If you would like to nominate the bug use ?.

Navin, what's the bug # on this major rewrite? Has it been done already?

mass re-assign.

I recently lost messages while reorganizing huge amounts of e-mail. I was either using 1.5 or 1.6 final at the time in Win2K. It happened a number of times while I was trying to reorganize. Some times Mozilla would just freeze, and I would have to start over after finding out what copied and what didn't copy. And I had to restore some mail from a backup copy. I eventually switched to moving smaller quantities of messages, then finally gave up because it was so much work, so my e-mail is not yet fully organized. I have over 100 subfolders and well over 50,000 messages dating back to 1997 (My older messages came from Netscape. I migrated from Netscape 4.7x to Mozilla back at 1.0-RC?). Good thing I back up my e-mail, but I would really like to feel safer about reorganizing my Mozilla mail.

Rolux and others, do you still see this problem? (I would think the problems you were experiencing at that time are gone)

I'm not aware of this problem having happened to me in a long time, though I haven't done much moving of e-mail in a long time either.

sorry for the spam. making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs. filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

I'm going to go ahead and close this bug as WORKSFORME. Eric, Rolux, and others, if you still see this or see it again, feel free to reopen (or comment if you're unable to reopen).