It's like a car whose engine randomly shuts down with a very low reproduction rate. Except with cars when this happened GM has recalled 30 million cars and paid billions of fines.
Emails to email client is an engine to the car. It is pointless without one and it is THE purpose of it. All the rest of functionality like fancy UI, filter, notifications, editor is meaningless if your emails were deleted without recovery. Even car without engine is more useful than email client with empty DB.
The big difference is a car with an engine that randomly shuts down is a life-and-limb safety issue. An email client that corrupts the database is extremely unlikely to cause a loss of life, even if the consequences are costly.
That said, even if the bug is impossible to isolate, it sounds like the chain of events that leads to it is known. They probably should disable the feature until someone is motivated to fix or replace the code. I'm sure that would anger a lot of people, but someone angry about the loss of a feature is probably better than someone who is angry at the loss of data. Especially given that the feature seems to be something someone would use to archive their mail.
That may be but i immediately uninstalled Thunderbird from all my devices upon seeing that its low priority and unassigned.
I wont be using any email client that can break and delete all my emails from local and the server. Why would i? It may be a lottery but it isnt one i want to play.
The fact that they see this as low priority shows theyre morons.
Who would say 'yes please' to an email client that might permanently destroy some of your most important data at random?
When i say they're morons, i mean it in terms of them not understanding the reputational and trust damage this can cause, via the thread, the low priority, lack of assignment, or word of mouth.
Far too focused on the engineering POV than the optics and trust/reputation damage. My kind of moronic, but still moronic.
It happens to me regularly. You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server using the "repair folder" feature, and I have backup, but it IS infuriating.
I have no good alternative to thunderbird, it does so much of what I want. But this bug is awful.
Note that this is why you use copy, check, then delete, instead of just "move" data, whenever it's important that the process works correctly
Even if the software doesn't have known bugs, I do it if the data is important enough and especially if I were to not have a backup (for example, because the storage provider takes care of backups and redundancy. I personally like to have another copy that I manage myself, but how many people have their IMAP emails or Spotify playlist data backed up for example? I do, but not many people I think)
I have been using TB on all operating systems with 8 or 9 users since 2006 and I never even once encountered this issue.
As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs, telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much just guesswork.
Granted given the severity of the consequences I would've chosen a more defensive move-strategy (e.g. one that deletes mails only once they have been copied verifiably), but that would have significant performance impacts in the 99.99% of cases where it works, so finding the real problem is preferable.
The truth is that if this happens to you regularly, that you are probably the prime person to gather more data on this. Call it giving back to Open Source software.
> As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs, telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much just guesswork.
As a software developer you should be able to reason about your code and work backwards from the observed result to investigate possible causes.
When a plane crashes or bridge collapses the engineers tasked with finding the cause don't just throw up their hands if they can't make it happen again.
> How is it not top 1 priority to fix it?
Maybe because it is very rare? I have been using thunderbird for 10 years now on various OSes and never had issues.