Thunderbird offline extension should use spam message download to get messages

[Mark Shuttleworth]

When Thunderbird is doing junk mail detection, it seems to download the
contents of mail messages to establish whether or not they are junk. To
the extent that the inbox is configured for use offline, it would be
useful for Thunderbird then to remember that it has downloaded the
message already, and not have to fetch it again later when going
offline. I'm not sure if the junk mail download includes the download of
attachments. If not, then obviously those messages with attachments will
still need a separate download when going offline. I'm willing to pay a
$50 paypal bounty for this feature.

 affects /products/thunderbird
 affects /distros/ubuntu/mozilla-thunderbird

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060210 Ubuntu/dapper Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060210 Ubuntu/dapper Firefox/1.5.0.1

It seems to me that the junk mail filter downloads the body of new messages to see if they might be junk. I have my Inbox set to be available offline (using the offline extension). When I go offline, the offline extension goes and downloads all mails again. If the junk mail filtering has already downloaded the mail, it would be good for the offline extension to store the messages for offline use when they are downloaded during junk mail processing.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install offline extension, make Inbox available for offline use, and activate the junk mail filter.
2. Check for new messages. The junk mail filter will quietly download the messages in the background, and mark the spam as spam.
3. Go offline.

Actual Results:
The offline extension will download the same messages AGAIN, for use offline.

Expected Results:
When the junk mail filter downloads the messages, they should be stored by the offline extension, so that they do not need to be downloaded again. This applies only to messages where the junk mail filter actually does download the whole thing.

I have a $50 paypal bounty on this. The bug is also registered in Launchpad at https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/32625

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

I've filed this bug in the upstream bug tracker and linked it to the upstream task.

[Vseerror (vseerror)]

should this be higher severity, or ENH?

[Kent-caspia (kent-caspia)]

It would be good to verify that this still occurs, as it is a fairly old report. But I would call this a bug, not an enhancement - but a minor bug.

[Wouter Stomp (wouterstomp-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Wouter Stomp (wouterstomp-deactivatedaccount)]

According to the upstream report this still happens. Set to confirmed.

[Vseerror (vseerror)]

rkent in comment #2
> It would be good to verify that this still occurs,

Reporter writes
Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (X11/20090105)
T-bird seems to download the full message body as soon as the new mail arrives, but perhaps that's just an illusion because I am mostly using high speed networks these days. Do we know if an explicit change has been made?

[Johnlgalt (johnlgalt)]

I attempted to verify if this is still occurring, but I suspect that I will need to find a very large attachment (as I also suspect that attachment size will not be factored into filtering for junk) and my connection is simply too fast to gauge if this is still occurring or not.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit (RTM) and Tb 3.0b4, Shredder 3.0pre, and Shredder 3.1a1 - mail profile contains several email addresses from various free sites as well as my ISP, mixture of IMAP and POP (and Yahoo via simulated POP via WebMail extension).

[Vseerror (vseerror)]

Mark, do you still see this problem??

After version 3, if this happens at all this would only happen if autosync were disabled, which is not the default