kmail: dangerous handling of dimap-folders

[Debian Bug Importer]

Automatically imported from Debian bug report #332473 http://bugs.debian.org/332473

[Debian Bug Importer (debzilla)]

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 19:11:59 +0200
From: Bastian Venthur <email address hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <email address hidden>
Subject: kmail: dangerous handling of dimap-folders

Package: kmail
Version: 4:3.4.2-2
Severity: normal

Hi KDE-maintainers,

I've posted a grave bug against kmail a few weeks ago and now I've found
another one, which is similar but not quite the same. Again it's
dangerous-dimap and it's pretty easy to lose your mails when you move
folders.

I try to reconstruct it the best I can, maybe you create a dimap account
yourself with a few folders and fill them with some spam mails in order
to see the effect.

NOTE: I'm translating the german menu-entrys into english so maybe they
are not 100% correct, I hope you still get the idea.

Assume we have two folders A and B filled with a few mails

(1) Rightclick a folder A and choose "move to".
(2) Now chose folder B where folder A should be moved to.
(3) Now you should see something like this:
   B (filled with mails)
   `-A (filled with mails)

The first problem: A is *not* moved into a at this stage -- allthough the
user thinks so, because he sees it. For the users point of view
everything seemed to work well. But:

(4) Now click "Send & Receive"... A stupid panel pops up, asking what
kind of data is stored into this (which?!) folder: folders or messages.

Here are two problems:
 (a) The user has absolutely no idea whats going on here, since
     he thinks his folder has allready been succesfully moved.
 (b) Under bad circumstances (happend to my today) you make more
     than one move operation or even create a new subfolder and
     then move some folder in the new created one -- now two of
     those panels pop up -- one for the newly created subfolder
     and one for the moved one. The problem is, that you cannot
     see which one kmail means, because its not shown to which
     folder the question is referring. If you choose "messages"
     instead of "folders" for the first subdir all your mails in
     this subdir are lost, but kmail still shows them! AGAIN:
     kmail shows your mails are still there, but they are gone
     because of the wrong decision.

(5) Now comes the funniest part. You've clicked "Send Receive" and think
all changes have been commited, but wrong -- you have to *restart* kmail
in order that the new mails are uploaded to the new folders. This is the
second time in one operation where kmails pretends to have done some
work but actually has not. Let's assume you forget to restart kmail and
just close it. After a while you start kmail on a different machine
(maybe laptop) but you are accessing the same dimap-account -- guess
what happens to your not-yet-uploaded mails...

I hope you where able to follow my steps please don't hesitate to ask if
I was unclear in certain points -- I know my english is not the best,
exspecially when I've lost some mails this day :)

Kind regards

Bastian

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Ker...

[Debian Bug Importer (debzilla)]

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 19:29:27 +0200
From: Bastian Venthur <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>, <email address hidden>
Subject: change severity to grave

severity 332473 grave
quit

Sorry, I meant to set the severity to grave not normal -- because we loose
data here.

Kind regards

Bastian

[Debian Bug Importer (debzilla)]

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 10:32:37 +0200
From: Bastian Venthur <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: reported to kde-bts

I've reported this bug to the KDE-BTS:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114163

[Carthik Sharma (carthik)]

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114163