Thunderbird 31 ate my profile
OK, I know I should be reporting this to bugzilla, but I find it an intimidating place. I work with programmers, but I don't necessarily understand them or how they think. I am often puzzled, and daunted, by the bluff unhelpfulness of the coders who do write to bugzilla.
I am normally a little impatient with users who refuse to upgrade or defer it as long as possible. In the last week, whilst I was at home and using Linux LMDE, I upgraded from TB24.6.0 to TB31 with no problems at all and I was left wondering why there were so many complaints about TB31.
Today I returned to work and updated from TB24.6 to TB 31 on my workplace Windows 7 machine. This was an unmitigated disaster. Thunderbird updated and ran, and showed an empty accounts list. Toggling round the folder views coerced it into showing my chat accounts, my various SMTP settings and Local Folders, though these last turned out to be incomplete.
I wasn't too concerned as most of my personal stuff is actually stored online in IMAP servers, and I have a reliable backup of important work-related material that had been stored in Local Folders and so could be restored.
I attempted to add one of my IMAP-based accounts in as if it were a new account, and it refused with the "server already exists" message. So it is as if TB was able to "see" the account settings (and hence refused to re-install the same account) but unable to display them.
When I re-installed TB24.6.0 I discovered the extent of the damage caused to my Profile. Most of the content of my Local Folders had gone. So TB31 had not only failed to use and implement the settings it found in the profile, it also deleted or removed much of the message store content.
All of my accounts bar one were IMAP-connected. All of these, and the sole POP account were lost. I can't comment usefully on RSS or newsgroups, as the firewall policies in my place of work make newsgroups unworkable, and I choose not to use RSS in TB, but even the abortive attempts of newsgroup installations I'd left in place in the hope that one day they may become viable went missing too.
No crashes, so no crash reports to submit. I'm reluctant to just add a "me too" to an existing bug, but if anyone can suggest where I could usefully report this, please tell me.
I don't have any solutions, nor suggestions on how to fix it. Safe Mode made no difference except that it invited me to set up an email account, so curiously, one or more of my add-ons may have influenced its awareness of account data in the profile.
As far as I can tell, my Address Book has survived intact, as have my filters and Saved Search folders.
All Replies (7)
Thanks for the update. I have been waiting to move to v31 since all the problems reported. I just went in and turned off the Check for Updates.
Perhaps I should add that even on the Linux installation where it isn't actually unusable, there are several nits.
Auto address-completion is slow. Valid auto-completed addresses show in red as if not validated. Many cosmetic changes, which are annoying, and as usual, set me off in search of a curative Theme. In some themes, controls which are important to me, such as Folder View Pane Switcher simply go absent. The Application Menu STILL says "New Message". Zooming via the keyboard (ctrl++, etc) is broken
<rant>My personal choice of OS and desktop (LMDE + Mate, if anyone is interested) gives me a full set of colourful icons across the desktop. (Well, I have 4 desktops, to be precise. I don't expect many Windows users to appreciate the value of this.) Most of my add-ons in TB and Fx have colourful icons too. So it seems perverse in the extreme that both Mozilla products impose their own grey icons, and it's a visual mess to have the mix. Why do they think it's right to impose this grey styling on us, particularly when it is so localized and incomplete?</rant>
Modified by Zenos
I am sympathetic, as are many other people, about profile dataloss issues, but these issues are basically impossible to diagnose/resolve without a reproducible testcase
Do you use the Google Contacts add-on. I have been having slow and not terribly good results with autofill and red addresses for a while and your posting prompted me to take a look. I had 60K of address books over three gmail accounts. Hundreds of duplicates of all shapes and sizes
Deleting those three address books brought the auto fill time back to acceptable and got rid of the Red. Now the thing does not appear to be able to add anything. Although the address books reappear on restart. They are empty.
Not that it helps you in any way, but there were no problems with upgrading to v31 here. I don't even see the red text in connection with autocomplete with Linux. Also using the Google Contacts add-on here, but no issues. My desktop environment is Gnome with default icons, and they are colourful.
I have the same issue. A few days ago I let TB update to 31.0, and have had nothing but problems since then. One of them being that all my local folders are no longer in the folder pane. I have safe-guarded important folders there, and don't know how to get them back or to show again. All my IMAP folders are there, but sometimes when I open TB after the update some of the IMAP accounts don't show, so I shut it down and restart TB, then they are there, most of the time. I also have been getting crome script error windows coming up, and constant "thunderbird isn't responding". Can I go back to the older version, and if so, how do I do this without loosing even more? It was working fine. It seems every time there is a TB update, I cringe and hold my breath... Any suggestions as to how I can fix this would be much appreciated. Please give me detailed step by step instructions as I am not good at technical computer stuff... I do backups of TB using mozbackup, but have never restored using it. Thanks,
I tried updating again today, to TB31.1.1 in Windows 7, and the same thing happened.
Having saved before-and-after states of the profile, I found this:
mail.accountmanager.accounts
had changed from:
account8,account6,account3,account9,account13,account11, account10,account1,account12,account15,account4,account22, account24,account27,account28
to:
account27,account28
Each time I restart it, it adds another two imaginary accounts and increments this:
mail.account.lastKey
by two.
The two accounts it allows to survive are both seldom-used and not particularly useful chat accounts. All the regular email, RSS feeds and newsgroups vanish. Note: I don't really have 28 accounts. The numbering is not contiguous and reflects the addition and deletion of email accounts over time.
Apart from what's in Local Folders, all of my useful accounts are IMAP and so it wouldn't be too traumatic to set them up as new. But then there is all the hassle of setting up passwords etc again, which is frustrating since it actually knows these already.
I have tried hand editing prefs.js to reinstate the lost accounts, (with TB closed, of course,) and it just does the same again. So, what's up? Why can't it just parse the list of existing accounts? Why does it insist on recreating and, in doing so, destroying the list of accounts?
Modified by Zenos