TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

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santamonica
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Joined: January 1st, 2008, 10:24 am

TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by santamonica »

Yesterday TB suddenly renamed a few folders in 2 of my mail profiles. It has added what seems to be 8 random numbers and characters at the end of the folder names.

What can be the cause of this, and how do I correct it? I don´t dare just renaming the folders back to what they were until I know what has happened.

I´ll appreciate any help in this matter!
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tanstaafl
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by tanstaafl »

POP or IMAP accounts?

What do the renamed folders have in common? I assume they're not "special" folders such as the inbox, drafts, sent, templates etc.

I've never heard of that happening before. Closest I can remember is a system restore renaming folders to "<original folder name>(2)". Take a look at your profiles.ini file and see if it has some new entries, possibly using those new folder names.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profiles.ini_file
santamonica
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Joined: January 1st, 2008, 10:24 am

Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by santamonica »

POP accounts.

As far as I can tell the renamed folders/subfolders have nothing in common, and they are not "special" folders but folders that I have created myself.

When I look at the profiles.ini file there is very little info there, no new entries or folder names at all. It only shows which profile is the default one.

I just remembered that one more thing that happened at the same time is that in Inbox when I went to file a mail, and went under Recent, the recent folders were gone, there was nothing there any more. As I continued to file different incoming pieces of mail new folders appeared again under Recent. Go figure...
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tanstaafl
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by tanstaafl »

Can you give me examples of the original and the renamed folder names?

Can you read mail in the renamed folders?

You might try using view -> folders -> all for a few days and see if that works around the problem. I know the "unified" folder view relies upon "saved search", sometimes it gets bogus folder listings and you have to delete the "virtualFolders.dat" file (which got corrupted). I don't know about "recent".
santamonica
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Joined: January 1st, 2008, 10:24 am

Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by santamonica »

Ok, here are some examples:
Was "Comviq", now "Comviq8dbf3f66"
Was ""Cint", now "Cintcb5e75ce"
Was "Bloggar", now "Bloggar5635345f"
...and so on and so on.

Yes I can still read the mail in the renamed folders. :-)

I am already using the view -> folders -> all option. You mention the "unified" folder view, is that what one should normally use? However, I have not changed that setting so I don´t think it has anything to do with that...except if "something" (TB?) changed it for me without my knowledge.
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tanstaafl
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by tanstaafl »

"All" is what most people use, and the least error prone. "Unified" is probably second in popularity.
santamonica
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by santamonica »

tanstaafl wrote:"All" is what most people use, and the least error prone. "Unified" is probably second in popularity.
Ok, so I´m good there, at least... :wink:

Any clues yet as to what can be going on with the renaming of some mail folders?
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tanstaafl
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by tanstaafl »

Nope. I couldn't find anything similar either on our forums, the official ones or the bug database. I did find one bug report - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219268 - which talked about "Special string(such as "bdb423ed") in file name of a mail folder itself is not a bug if special characters which could not be used in file_path_name are used in mail folder name." but you're not deliberately renaming or moving folders. Is there any other process/application running (perhaps in the background) that might access the profile other than your anti-virus scanner?
santamonica
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by santamonica »

The link you provide gives some examples that resembles my case, but not entirely.

What kind of process could that be? How can I check if some other process/app is accessing the profile?
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tanstaafl
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by tanstaafl »

Some backup programs such as MozBackup can be run as windows services, so they're run in the background.

Programs such as Process Monitor from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sys ... s/bb896645 can be used to search for who has a specific file open. Process Explorer from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sys ... s/bb896653 can be used to see what files a process has open. The problem is that the file you are interested in might not be open at the moment. For example, Thunderbird opens prefs.js on startup but closes it afterwards, and may briefly open it to update it as needed.

I've never tried Phrozen Windows File Monitor at http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pwinfilemon.html . It sounds more useful though as supposedly you can tell it log specific events such as any process renaming a file.
santamonica
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by santamonica »

Tried Phrozen Windows File Monitor but had to deinstall it again since it was using up all my CPU. :(

Other than that, as a test, I renamed one of the less important folders back to its original name. Nothing has changed it again and everything is still in it so I am kind of wondering if I could just rename all the folders in question back to their original names and just leave it at that. What do you think?

I wish there was a way of knowing though why this happened in the first place...
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tanstaafl
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by tanstaafl »

I suggest you rename them back to the original names and keep an eye on them, see if they change. If they do change again, perhaps this type you'll be able to correlate it with something else.
santamonica
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by santamonica »

Will do.

Thanks for your help! :)
santamonica
Posts: 45
Joined: January 1st, 2008, 10:24 am

Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by santamonica »

Hi again...
A few days ago I renamed all the folders back to their original names.

Today when I opened TB I suddenly had the renaming happen again, but so far only to one folder. Before I even saw that that had happened I had the alert box with a warning text in it appear again and this time I made a note of exactly what it said.

"Alert
Unable to open the summary file for inbox. Perhaps there was an error on disk, or the full path is too long. "

I now recognized the alert text from last time and went straight in to see if there had been any renaming done, and sure enough one folder had been renamed. The folder in question is originally named LUNNEVIK, but now changed to LUNNEVIK5f44611f

With this new info from the alert text would you tanstaafl, or anyone else, know why this is happening. I don´t fully understand the meaning of the alert text content, and what I should do to correct the problem.
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tanstaafl
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Re: TB suddenly renamed some folders/subfolders

Post by tanstaafl »

There was a recent thread about occasionally being unable to open a summary file after running Thunderbird for about an hour that turned out to be due to too many files being opened. They were running Linux, which has a lower limit than Windows. They were also using IMAP accounts, which open more files due to offline folders. The problem was solved by using a Linux command to raise the limit. I wouldn't have expected you to be as vulnerable since you are using POP accounts under Windows, if you were running into the same problem it should not have occurred immediately upon starting, and it also doesn't explain why folders are being renamed.

Let me think for a bit. In the interim I suggest you try disabling global search/indexing in tools -> options -> advanced -> general (you could enable the quick filter toolbar and use it search the current folder as a temporary workaround), use view -> folders -> all (if you weren't already) and start in safe mode (help -> restart with add-ons disabled) and see if that makes a difference.
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