virtualFolders.dat and resulting msf files. (Saved Search)

[jmkakabarb]

Here's a curly one, the search properties on my saved search folders changed this morning when I restarted Thunderbird (1.0.6)
Although the saved search folders were still there the filters had either dissapeared or (in 3 cases (I have 20+ Saved Search folders)) the filter for one saved search was now associated with another saved search folder.

First thought was that the msf's were corrupt so checked them and they had no filters (or the wrong ones) also.

Thankfully I backup both my mail folders and the Thunderbird dir which is in my windows profile dir, so I checked the backup from 6 this morn and all the msf's were good, so I restored them, restarted Thunderbird and the problem occured again, checked the msf's again and again they were either empty or had the wrong filters (with new timestamps).

So this time I restored the msf's again AND the content of the windows profile dir (including virtualFolders.dat where all these filters etc are persisted (or so I thought)) thinking the original and possibly corrupt virtualFolders.dat must have been loaded when I restarted Thunderbird resulting in the bad msf's.

Having confirmed that the msf's and virtualFolders.dat file (from the backup) were correcct, and all the filters therein were ok, I started Thunderbird again, once again my msf's got hosed (this time the filters which appeared in the wrong saved search folders were different!, it's almost random), and I watched as the virtualFolders.dat was rewritten, with accurate (but wrong ) info regarding my virtual Folders.

Running out of ideas I decided to restore everything again, then upgrade to 1.0.7, then restart, same result

I am now faced with rebuilding all my Save Search folder filters, at least I have the original msf's and virtualFolder.dat to use as a reference, so not the end of the world, but now I am nervous that once I have completed this Thunderbird might screw them all up again.

Maybe I'll try blowing away all my saved search msf's and restoring the backedup virtualFolders.dat next...

Does anyone know what the sequence of events is regarding virtualFolders.dat and msf's when Thunderbird starts up? I thought it would read virtualFolders.dat first and modify the msf's if required but from the behaviour I have observed so far I have to wonder.

Any observations welcomed, I'll keep you up to date with my findings, and possibly start a thrad in the bug discussion forum if I can get some predictable behaviour.

Please help restore my confidence in this email client which up until today has been #1 on my list of software.

[Freee!!]

Forget about the files with the .msf extension, those are index files that can and will be rebuilt when necessary. By restoring previous versions you are more likely to cause more corruption.

[jmkakabarb]

Thanks that helps, I wont bother restoring them again.

[jmkakabarb]

I deleted all the msf's and restored the good virtualFolder.dat file (a good one) and started Thunderbird again, resulting msf's and virtualFolders.dat have been damaged again, I'll keep hunting.

[mppic]

Sorry for reviving a four years old thread, but the exact same thing happened to me recently with TB 2.0.0.22 (20090608) running on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid). While I have no idea what caused the problem I seem to have found a way to solve it and wanted to share it: My saved searches stopped getting corrupted on TB restarts after migrating to a newly created profile.

What I did:

• rename current (corrupt) profile dir to <old> (keep this intact as a backup!)
• start TB profile manager: "thunderbird -profile-manager"
• delete all profiles
• create new one
• start Thunderbird
• enter arbitrary data in profile configuration wizard (it will be overwritten later on anyway)
• completely close Thunderbird
• copy data from <old> to new profile, overwriting existing files:
• "Mail" directory (mails and filters)
• prefs.js (configuration)
• *.mab (address books)
• training.dat (junk filter training data)
• put known good backup copy of virtualFolders.dat in new profile

I have been testing the new profile for a couple of days now and the saved searches are still ok, so I hope this procedure really fixed it. This obviously does not work if a problem is cased by your settings (prefs.js), but this was not the case here. YMMV, but I hope this helps someone!

[DanRaisch]

Locking this due to the age of the original posts.