M2 deleted almost all my messages - locally and on the IMAP server - twice!

M2 deleted almost all my messages - locally and on the IMAP server - twice!

Hi,
thank god I did a backup. But let's start with the facts:
-Opera 10.52
-Windows 7 32bit
-Webmail provider: 1blu, all my other mailboxes are forwarded there
-Connection: IMAP, port 143
In IMAP settings, I have checked "make all messages available offline".
My IMAP sent folder is set to the "Sent" folder of my IMAP account (btw it's a pity there's no option to select your IMAP drafts folder).

I'm a happy M2 user since 10 years or so. Today I installed Thunderbird in order to backup my whole IMAP server (~1.6 GB), since Opera had become unreliable (see below). Thunderbird works well, but it's ugly, and I would hate being forced to stop using M2. But I fear I have no choice - Opera missed its second chance

A few weeks ago, probably since I installed 10.51, M2 started downloading kind of all my mails on its first startup every day.
This was rather annoying, as you might understand - we're speaking of downloading more than 1 GB every morning!
In order to stop this, I deleted my mail account, set it up once again, and made M2 download all my mails from the IMAP server.
Now the ugly part: On the next start Opera hung for quite a while, and when it became responsive again, it had deleted all the mail in all my IMAP folders except INBOX (where I keep all the mails that don't fit into one of the folders). It had deleted even the "Sent" folder.

Of course, I had updated my whole Opera mail directory, so I
-restored the whole mail folder,
-deleted all my filters (I used M2 filters before for convenience, because my IMAP provider doesn't support filtering on the server),
-went to university, where the fast internet is, to refill all the empty folders, and then
-stopped using M2 (by changing a letter in the mail server paths) and
-used the webmail interface for a week or so.

Today I wanted to give M2 another try. First I backuped the whole IMAP server with Thunderbird in order to keep the mails from the last week in case M2 would misbehave again. Then I restored the mail server paths and made M2 check email.
Everything seemed fine, the emails from the last week appeard in M2, and I was happy.
I closed Opera, made sure it had disappeared also from the Process Monitor (which can take up to 30secs on my machine), and started Opera again. Guess what? It hung for 2 minutes or so, and when it was done, all my mails except for the INBOX folder were gone to nirvana - again!

I'm right now sitting here restoring all the mails to the IMAP server, and will then switch over to Thunderbird. Bye M2, I had happy 10 years with you, but enough is enough.

Not to say anything else than YMMV, but I have had exactly the same problems with Thunderbird. I.e. it deleting all local copies of IMAP mails and then having to download them again.

Sorry this has happened. M2 hasn't done anything like this to me since the 8.54 days or so.

Have you tried closing down Opera, deleting the mail folder (will of course wipe out your feeds, newsgroups, pop accounts and filters etc. too), starting Opera and recreating the IMAP account?

In this case, it looks like something's messed up with the mail files. If you don't start with a fresh mail folder, you are probably just going to recreate the problem every time you try.

Also, while Opera is closed, delete the cache, temporary_downloads and opcache folders just in case you have any corruption caused by the buggy 10.5 and 10.51 builds that wasn't repaired by 10.52 when you upgraded to it.

If things still get messed up when using "make all messages available offline", then, this could be an issue with the number of messages you have and or the size of the messages (total or some single message).

(Side Note: "make all messages available offline" is just an option to automatically cache messages. If you delete the IMAP account, that cache goes with it. You probably know this, but just wanted to be clear.)

Update: 1: I found out I'm using Opera for only 5 years - there was just one message falsely dated 01.01.2000

Update 2: Using M2 again - it still crashes Opera when I switch folders too quickly (not sure of this is the reason though), but it has stopped deleting my messages.

What I did:
- Imported all my mail from Thunderbird in to Opera (thereby losing most of the category tags, but hey, that's OK)
- Stopped using filters (at least for the moment)
- Unchecked "make all messages available offline"
- Forced the Mail database consistency check, several times (thank you for your tip, burnout: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=5130421)
- Forced single connection for IMAP by editing incomingN.txt (again, thanks to burnout: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=5143261)
- deleted the cache, temporary_downloads and opcache folders

Now I'm almost happy again