thunderbird stopped displaying folders

[Rolf Leggewie]

I didn't use Thunderbird for about a month or so on my netbook and the package must have been updated in the meantime. Unfortunately, TB now no longer displays the folder and is thus entirely unusable (see screenshot). This account has used TB for mail for years and obviously has a bunch of (IMAP) folders, in fact, they account for about 2G of files locally. The same package works fine on another computer. The problem occurs even in safe-mode. I am running TB 17.0.8+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 on precise.

Another thing I noticed is that TB is extremely slow to start up recently. It takes about a minute of real time or 30s of CPU time before even the window is displayed.

I have downgraded to 17.0.6+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 now and that works fine, so this is a regression.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Wouter Hanegraaff (wouter-openoffice)]

I can confirm this problem. I tried re-creating the thunderbird profile, but it didn't solve the issue.

[Valentijn Sessink (valentijn)]

Hmm. I can reproduce the issue by putting the following line in /etc/thunderbird/syspref.js:
pref("toolkit.telemetry.prompted", true);

However, if I set this in prefs.js in the user's profile, after a restart Thunderbird has changed this into
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.prompted", 2);

Changing the syspref option to "2" instead of "true" seems to resolve the issue.

Those that suffer from this bug, could you look into /etc/thunderbird/syspref.js if it has any prefs enabled? (The default file does not change anything).

[Valentijn Sessink (valentijn)]

This is the related mozilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=807848, and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=842073 provides background information and -noise.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Valentijn, thank you for those findings. For what it's worth, I do not have anything related to telemetry in /etc/thunderbird/syspref.js. My settings in ~/.thunderbird/*/prefs are as follows

$ grep telemet ~/.thunderbird/*/prefs.js
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.enabled", true);
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.previousBuildID", "20130913150425");
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.prompted", 2);

I only experience this from time to time now on TB 24.0. A restart of TB usually fixes the problem. Startup times and times to scroll the folder list are still extremely slow.

[Vseerror (vseerror)]

Does anyone still see this issue?
Which which window manager?

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

FWIW, I do not experience this problem anymore.

I do have much worse problems with TB now, though, to be honest...

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Reporter says not a problem any more in comment #8
Both upstream bugs are showing "RESOLVED FIXED" (target TB24)
So closing by marking "Fix Released"