Cannot remove a Thunderbird RSS folder

[Greg Toombs]

I signed up to an RSS feed in Thunderbird, "Lolcats 'n' Funny Pictures - I Can Has Cheezburger?". The RSS feed never downloaded anything, so I try to unsubscribe. In Subscriptions, the folder no longer has a + beside it, and when selected the Delete button is disabled. In the folder tree, if I try to delete the folder, Thunderbird says:

A folder with that name already exists. Please choose a different name.

If I try renaming the folder, Thunderbird says:

The folder could not be renamed. Perhaps the folder is being reparsed, or the new name is not a valid folder name.

When I restarted Thunderbird and tried to delete the folder again, the original folder was not removed, and two new folders appear in the Trash folder:

Lolcats 'n' Funny Pictures - I Can Has Cheezburc69489bd
Lolcats 'n' Funny Pictures - I Can Has Cheezburger69ecb920

I can successfully delete these folders. I try to delete the original, it says a folder already exists with the same name, I successfully rename it this time, successfully delete it, but then when I restart thunderbird the original has appeared again and when I try to delete that the two corrupted folders appear in my trash again.

I'm pretty much going in circles here and don't know what to do. (Lolcats have infected my Thunderbird account.) Nothing appears on the command line if I run Thunderbird from there. Any ideas?

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

I'm running Xubuntu 8.04, and Thunderbird version 2.0.0.16 (20080724), listed as 2.0.0.16+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1 in apt.

[Parthan SR (parth-technofreak)]

Thank you for taking your time to file this bug and help make Ubuntu better. When I tried to reproduce your bug in the same version of thundebird under Ubuntu 8.04, I could subscribe to a new RSS feed, update feed and remove the RSS feed folder by pressing delete while it is selected. This moved the feed to the trash, from where you can again delete it by pressing delete button. I tried it with the same RSS feed you had specified in your report (http://feedproxy.google.com/ICanHasCheezburger).

This problem is not reproducible and hence am closing this bug. Feel free to reopen if it can be confirmed by someone else. Thank you once again and keep reporting bugs if you find one.

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

Well, I figured out how to remove the offending content myself, by deleting the appropriate files in ~/.mozilla-profiles/thunderbird/wpe6rtvh.default/Mail/News & Blogs (in case anyone ever has the same problem). Cheers.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Parthan wrote:
> Thank you for taking your time to file this bug and help make Ubuntu
> better. When I tried to reproduce your bug in the same version of
> thundebird under Ubuntu 8.04, I could subscribe to a new RSS feed,
> update feed and remove the RSS feed folder by pressing delete while it
> is selected. This moved the feed to the trash, from where you can again
> delete it by pressing delete button. I tried it with the same RSS feed
> you had specified in your report
> (http://feedproxy.google.com/ICanHasCheezburger).
>
> This problem is not reproducible and hence am closing this bug. Feel
> free to reopen if it can be confirmed by someone else. Thank you once
> again and keep reporting bugs if you find one.
>
> ** Changed in: mozilla-thunderbird (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Invalid
>
>
Parhan: Please dont mark bugs invalid if you cant reproduce the issue.
He may still have problem.

Greg: Can you please list all themes and addons you have on your
thunderbird? Is it just this feed? Can you please test others? If others
have same issue please run
"mv ~/.mozilla-thunderbird ~/.mozilla-thunderbird.old" without the "

This will allow you to start with clean thunderbird so you will have to
set up a feed if you do this please try the broken feed and atleast 2
others.

 status incomplete

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Greg Toombs wrote:
> Well, I figured out how to remove the offending content myself, by
> deleting the appropriate files in ~/.mozilla-
> profiles/thunderbird/wpe6rtvh.default/Mail/News & Blogs (in case anyone
> ever has the same problem). Cheers.
>
>
Greg: please try again, i need to know if its your profile or just a fluke.

[Parthan SR (parth-technofreak)]

John,

Ok, thanks for letting me know. Sorry.

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

I resubscribed to the feed and this time it's fine. I believe the problem was caused by a combination of an old version of Thunderbird that used to access the profile, the question mark in the feed title, and perhaps the fact that the profile sits on a FAT partition that can't handle question marks.

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

Note that if I try to rename the current feed folder to add a question mark, Thunderbird still says that it cannot rename it, probably because the profile is on a FAT partition. I'm not sure if this would qualify as a bug or a feature request to work around this limitation of FAT. I suppose Thunderbird should code a work-around for this situation, possibly by using some escape sequence.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

The issue was relateed to profile and has been fixed.
As for the FAT issue you might want to file it upstream since we dont support you FAT32 issue.

[Curtis Ballard (thunderbird-theballards)]

I thought I would report that I have encountered exactly the same problem using Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 (20080708) with Mail Redirect 0.7.4 and Talkback 2.0.0.9 add-ons installed.

Interestingly enough I was using exactly the same RSS feed but found this submittal by searching on the error message.

I think in my case the problem may have somehow originated when I added the feed. I added the feed and didn't get anything so I added the feed again. Thunderbird allowed adding the feed the second time and showed two feeds with the same name in the list of feeds. Only one of those feeds ever showed any content. I tried to delete the duplicate feed that didn't receive any content and it moved that feed into the trash but took all of the content from the other feed by the same name with it. After that it quit receiving any more feed content and I can't get the feed out of the trash or out of the active list. I've tried deleting, restarting, empty trash, restart and the feed moves out of the trash and back into the active list when I do that so I end up with two feeds that have duplicate names neither of which ever downloads any content.

I'll leave my profile as is for a bit in case there are any questions.

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

Curtis, do you know what file system your profile is stored on?

[Curtis Ballard (thunderbird-theballards)]

I should know better about giving full details. The file system is NTFS on RAID 0 with an Intel 82801ER SATA RAID controller

Some other details that might be helpful:
OS Name Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server 2003, Standard Edition
Version 5.2.3790 Service Pack 2 Build 3790
Other OS Description R2
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name XXXXXXXXX
System Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
System Model hp workstation xw8200
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 10 GenuineIntel ~3400 Mhz
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 10 GenuineIntel ~3400 Mhz
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 10 GenuineIntel ~3400 Mhz
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 10 GenuineIntel ~3400 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Hewlett-Packard 786B8 v2.08, 12/22/2005
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume2
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.2.3790.3959 (srv03_sp2_rtm.070216-1710)"
User Name XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Time Zone Mountain Daylight Time
Total Physical Memory 3,583.47 MB
Available Physical Memory 2.45 GB
Total Virtual Memory 5.35 GB
Available Virtual Memory 4.32 GB
Page File Space 2.00 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

I think only the NTFS part is important ;-)
My theory is that Thunderbird for Linux assumes that it's okay to put a "?" into a filename, and it is for sane filesystems like EXT, but not FAT or NTFS, as that's reserved as a wildcard, so things blow up.

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

I am re-opening this bug. I've been adding more RSS feeds with normal-looking titles, and several of them exhibit this behaviour: When I initially try to subscribe, Thunderbird displays "Verifying feed" but never gets past that. If I try to cancel and it asks me if I'm sure, the yes/no choice doesn't affect the outcome. A broken folder is created, often with a name with numbers in it, that you can't delete, and the folder is empty and does not receive new RSS items from the feed. For me, the following feeds have this behaviour (so far):

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/rss/
http://rss.cbc.ca/lineup/topstories.xml

To contrast (if you can detect any difference) here are some feeds that do work:
http://www.projectcensored.org/feed/
http://www.democracynow.org/democracynow.rss
http://indymedia.org/en/main-features.rss
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Engrishdotcom

This behaviour is consistent and a little aggravating for an otherwise acceptable aggregator.

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092510 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.17 (20080925)

When I try to add either of these RSS feeds to the Thunderbird aggregator, "Verifying RSS feed..." is shown and does not go away.

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/rss/
http://rss.cbc.ca/lineup/topstories.xml

When I cancel subscription, there is a new RSS folder that I cannot delete. For reference, here are some feeds that do work:

http://www.projectcensored.org/feed/
http://www.democracynow.org/democracynow.rss
http://indymedia.org/en/main-features.rss
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Engrishdotcom

This is an upstream report from http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-thunderbird/+bug/256086 .

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Attempt to subscribe to either of the aforementioned feeds.
2. Watch it fail.

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

Sent upstream as http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460557

[Joshua Cranmer (jcranmer)]

Both supposed problematic feeds WFM on Linux 2.0.0.17pre. It seems that the problem is a filesystem issue; for reference, my profile is stored on a NTFS partition.

Do you still fail at subscribing to the feeds?

[Greg Toombs (greg-toombs)]

After upgrading to intrepid and moving my profile to my home directory on an ext3 partition, everything works. I think it's the fact that it was on a FAT32 partition.

[Mkmelin+mozilla (mkmelin+mozilla)]

->WFM then

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Can anyone else reproduce this bug? I am pakcagnig wizz* extension for rss feeds for firefox and i think i added support for tbird if not i will oncce it gets pushed into jaunty than look into backporting it. Upstream closed the bug due to it working.

[John-haan (john-haan)]

Subscribing to a feed with a very long URL / name seems to reproduce the issue on Vista x64.

[Neil Perry (nperry)]

We are closing this bug report as there hasn't been any activity. Please upgrade to the latest release Karmic 9.10 - If this bug is still reproducible please set Status to New. Thanks