luca Reporter
	Description • 22 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; ca; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; ca; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

When I read a message its seen state changes from unseen to seen (ie, the
subject goes from bold to normal). From time to time, right after going from
unseen to seen it goes right back to unseen, and then, after a while (couple of
seconds) it reverts back to seen (even if I'm now reading another message, in
fact at the same time all messages displaying as "unseen" but that have been
seen go back to seen).
I'm not sure the component is Networking:IMAP, but I'm seeing it with an imap
server (cyrus imaps 2.1.12) and have no local folders.
I know that cyrus imapd have some problems with multiple connection uptating the
seen state, anyway I have selected compile time options to minimize this problem
(It happened no more that once a month up to mozilla 1.2.1 but without the
flickering I'm reporting now, ie. seen messages just reverted to unseen).
I didn't see the same problem on Linux.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:

	Daniel Wang
	Comment 1 • 22 years ago

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 195787 ***

	luca Reporter
	Comment 2 • 22 years ago

I'm not convinced this is the same as bug 195787 (though I didn't think to
search for "read" since the flag is "seen"), it's similar but not the same:

1) in bug 195787 messages go back to unseen/unread and then stay that way, while
in my case they eventually reflect the correct (seen/read) state.

2) bug 195787 is about the inbox, I see this in every folder (including the inbox).

3) bug 195787 has been reported for mozilla 1.0.0, while I never saw this
behaviour until mozilla 1.3 (yes, I saw something similar to bug 195787 but that
was a cyrus bug now solved).

	David :Bienvenu
	Comment 3 • 21 years ago

I don't know if this is a dup or not. I'm going to re-open this one.

Your comment in bug 195787 is pretty close to spot on:
-------------------------------------------------------------
"1) the message is preloaded in the cache
2) the user selects the message for display, the message won't be fetched again,
and mozilla displays it as read but...
3) at the same time there's a check for new mail running, all threads are busy
so 2) cannot mark the message as read in the server immediately, the order to
mark it as read is queued
4) the check for new mail fetches the flags from the server. Since the update
from 2) is still pending, it will see the message as unread and display it that way
5) eventually 3) terminates so 2) can update the server. The message displays
again as new.

The time between 2) and 5) can be very short (the flicker will be barely
noticeable) or can be various seconds."
------------------------------------------------

There is an extra complication, which is that we won't make two simultaneous
connections to a folder, so if an update of the current folder is going on, we
won't be able to store the seen flag until that update is finished. And for a
little more fun, if you have a message filtered into a currently open folder, we
will update the current folder. If you read a message while that's going on,
there will be the same flicker.

So, fixing this is harder than it might sound. We don't keep track of these
pending stores of the seen flag. If you have a ton of folders that you're
checking for new mail, it does make this much more likely to happen. My
preference for fixing that would be to chain the checks for new mail in all
those folders instead of firing them off all at once, and to try to use the
status command.

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 4 • 19 years ago

confirming tho possible dup of bug
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195787 b/c might not want to lose
the bug in the "big auto triage"

	Richard Gardner
	Comment 5 • 17 years ago

I have Version 2.0.0.0 Build 20070326 - and I have exactly the same bug. Random emails revert to bold/unread. This is only in my local folder, not in my profiles. It's not all emails, and the number of undread/bold increases each time I run Thunderbird. Any suggestions for a fix? 

	Jay Levitt
	Comment 6 • 16 years ago

See also: bug 284030, bug 243117, bug 436769.

I'm not sure if these are all the same bug or not, especially given David's comment 3.  That explanation sounds different from my wild guess, which is:

""When anything refreshes or modifies the list pane, and the pane ends up with a message selected, the 'Mark message read after N seconds' preference will start its countdown on that message.  In many cases, that is undesirable behavior."  (But: see bug 436769 comment 7 for someone who disagrees with me, and thinks it's usually desirable.)

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 7 • 15 years ago

xref bug 513235 read/unread status bounces when marking message as read

luca writes "sometimes there's a short flicker" using v2

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 8 • 15 years ago

bienvenu, is the cause for the following essentially the same as you describe here in comment 3?

- Bug 243117 - Message marked unread gets marked read again after IMAP download complete
- Bug 284030 - Clearing quicksearch marks unread mail read
- Bug 373366 - "Wait before marking messages read" broken on large IMAP messages
-

	David :Bienvenu
	Comment 9 • 15 years ago

Wayne, yes, I believe it is.

	David Ascher (:davida)
	Comment 10 • 15 years ago

This affects perceived perf, so it affects perf.  I'm seeing it more often than before, not sure why.

	David :Bienvenu
	Comment 11 • 15 years ago

Bwinton kindly suggested using http://mschrag.github.com/ to simulate slow connections, which davida thinks might make it easier to see this issue. I wonder if dropped connections might be involved as well.

	Nikolay Shopik
	Comment 12 • 15 years ago

High latency connection also could suffer from this, message could "toggle" or "blink"

	Jay Levitt
	Comment 13 • 15 years ago

FWIW, though, I'm seeing this on my mail server (Dovecot 1.2), which I am the sole user of, and which is 10 feet away via gigabit Ethernet.

	Nikolay Shopik
	Comment 14 • 15 years ago

For sake of completeness I've never seen such problem with dovecot 1.2 server which is in another country. Only when connection is unreliable or slow as hell.

	Jay Levitt
	Comment 15 • 15 years ago

Oh! Sorry, I got confused.  This bug is about *all* cases of messages changing status; I only see it under specific circumstances (switching folders/views) as in #284030.  I bet there are similar race conditions with slow/dropped connections.

	David :Bienvenu
	Comment 16 • 15 years ago

yeah, np, yes, this is a completely different bug.

	David :Bienvenu
	Comment 17 • 15 years ago

I don't think we'd block for this, given the other more important bugs we have.

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 18 • 14 years ago

33 bugs, several are probably related: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc=read%20unread&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=normal&bug_severity=minor&bug_severity=trivial&short_desc_type=allwords&type0-0-0=nowords&value0-0-0=count%20counts&resolution=---&product=MailNews%20Core&product=Thunderbird (plus bug 525307)

I am seeing a new phenomenon (for me anyway) where only messages with html content go unread immediately upon selection, and these messages have "this may be a scam" or "display remote content".  And for some reason, it stops happening after some event or number of messages. This on my win7 with new profile, and Automatic mark unread is disabled. I haven't found a bug report for this, and perhaps deserves a new bug. But I mention it hear, to ask could this behavior be related to this bug?  Or perhaps related to bug 525307?  (tried to reproduce once with pop account - unsuccessful)

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 21 • 9 years ago

perhaps a better query http://mzl.la/1j8gG5Q

	psn
	Comment 22 • 8 years ago

Is 10 Mbit/s connection slow?
For me it happens only in inbox; messages do not become "read" later.
For example, today I opened Daily and got together 6 bugzilla messages; no other activity (64-bit Windows 8.1 and Daily). 

List is ordered by time, latest at the bottom; lower pane shows message text; options set to mark as read immediately on display.
I clickedsuccessively each of top 3, and statuses properly changed. It was not fast, I was reading texts.
Then I clicked fourth, and the one above became unread.

Sometimes just only one message arrives, and then stubbornly refuses to get status 'read'.
It might require multiple actions - random combination of 'get messages', open message in tab, display other message(s) and then return to the latest one).

	Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)
	Comment 23 • 8 years ago

> Is 10 Mbit/s connection slow?

If you have smallish messages I would sy 10 isn't too slow.  Connections which are much slower are the ones that tend to have trouble - and the issues tend to be server related.

	psn
	Comment 24 • 8 years ago

While the issue should be related to external mail server, but also it is possible that Thunderbird does not always changes/sets its internal states properly.
For example: there was a tray notification for received e-mail (one message).
It was the last in the list, and text was displayed in message pane below.
However, in the tree pane 'Inbox' was still highlighted with bold typeface and blue colour even though it was not 'Inbox(1)'. Clicking on the root and back on Inbox finally changed colour to standard black.

	Aca Vengo
	Comment 25 • 8 years ago

I have my settings to mark messages as read immediately, no delay.
When I get new messages, open one and then scroll to others, the first message I opened reverts back to being unread. I believe it only happens to the first message I open.

I am on Thunderbird 45.5.1. I believe this started happening with the latest release or the one before that.

	blondie101010
	Comment 26 • 8 years ago

(In reply to Aca Vengo from comment #25)
> I have my settings to mark messages as read immediately, no delay.
> When I get new messages, open one and then scroll to others, the first
> message I opened reverts back to being unread. I believe it only happens to
> the first message I open.
> 
> I am on Thunderbird 45.5.1. I believe this started happening with the latest
> release or the one before that.

I have the exact same problem and I agree that it's fairly recent.

After clicking a message or choosing to mark the folder read, they immediately show as read and sometimes (often), one or more of them will revert to unread.

It's as if the sync from the server was done before it got the update from the client.  I suspect (I haven't looked at the code) that the client dismisses it's update list when it receives an update from the server.

I can also add that it happens with different IMAP providers exactly in the same fashion.

	Erik
	Comment 27 • 7 years ago

Some problem here (Thunderbird 52.0b3 on Windows), it's fairly recent.