GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 726665
Multiple erroneous draft conversations created when writing/replying
Last modified: 2014-03-18 22:56:10 UTC
I upgraded by version of Geary from 0.4.3 (?) to 0.6.0 yesterday. When I came to write my first new e-mail using the new version, I noticed that the unread count bubble next to the "Drafts" folder was showing, and the number kept increasing. It took me a few minutes (and several corrections) to complete my e-mail, by which time the "Drafts" folder showed 50 unread messages. I sent the e-mail; then switched to the "Drafts" folder to see what was going on. All 50 entries were various stages of the e-mail I had just sent! I trashed them all. I've just sent another (much shorter) e-mail - this time it was a reply - and got up to a count of 4 in the "Drafts" bubble. Actually, this showed up as a conversation with 4 parts, which was the right number of parts but: (a) it shouldn't have been in "Drafts" at all because the e-mail had been sent by the time I looked in there and I never saved it as a draft; and (b) it was incorrect that I'd not read any of the parts of the conversation - I'd written two! - although the counting of "unread" parts of a conversation is something I've already noticed is buggy in Geary, since I was using the 0.4.3 version. For the record, I am running Geary on the Mate version of Linux Mint 16 "Petra". I realise that Mate uses Gtk2 and Geary uses Gtk3, but the online advice says that Gtk3 applications should run without problem on Mate. Anyway, I wouldn't expect this error to have anything to do with the widget set used.
Robert, what email service are you using? When you select your drafts folder, does the toolbar show a Trash button or a Delete button? If you hold down the Shift key, does the Trash/Delete button change? As far as the "unread" count in the drafts folder -- the drafts folder's count is actually the number of messages total, not the number of unread messages. It's the same in the Outbox, as these are places that having *any* message presumably is something you need to know about.
Thanks for the prompt response, Charles. The e-mail account I have attached to Geary is an IMAP service hosted by ZOHO. I didn't get this odd "Drafts" behaviour with Geary 0.4.3, so it must have come in for version 0.6.0. When I select the "Drafts" folder, the toolbar shows a Trash button (not a Delete button). When I hold down the Shift key, the Trash button turns into a Delete button. When I release it, it goes back to being a Trash button. Thanks for that advice about the "unread" count. That makes sense, apart from the fact that nothing should be appearing in my "Drafts" folder unless I put it there!
Thanks for getting back to us, Robert. I wanted to rule out Geary not recognizing the Drafts folder properly, and I think we've succeeded there. A point of clarification: Geary auto-saves drafts as you type. I don't know what Geary looks like in Mint, but you should see a label at the bottom of the composer that says "Saving" or "Saved" to let you know it's working. It's fairly aggressive, saving a new version as soon as you stop typing for a few seconds. Now, normally that doesn't cause the problem you're seeing, because we detect when we've simply changed since the last time we saved a draft and delete the old one (and delete it after it's sent), so you *should* only see 1 draft, and it *should* only exist until you hit send. You may be running into bug #713983, where we know in certain circumstances we can't detect whether we need to save a new draft or overwrite an old one. Can you run Geary like: geary --debug --log-network > geary.log and then send us the log file privately at geary@yorba.org? Feel free to scrub the log of any sensitive information before sending it to us. Thanks for your help!
I don't see the server reporting it supports UIDPLUS, which is how we track drafts once they've been uploaded. I'm closing this as a duplicate, since we already have a ticket to support drafts better in the absence of UIDPLUS. We'll try to tackle that bug soon, since what you report is a pretty bad experience, and who knows how many people it's affecting (it seems rare for servers not to support UIDPLUS, but obviously it happens). I'm afraid in the meantime, you're stuck deleting drafts manually in Geary. Thanks for your help diagnosing the issue! *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 713983 ***