Held off the update to Thunderbird in iodé 5.8 on my Fairphone 3+ for a little while, I wanted to double-check everything before I made the switch from p=p. But I’ve had some inexplicable vanishing emails. Curious whether anybody else has run into this and thought I should issue a warning to others. It may come about in part due to a conflict between the two apps, since p=p is not yet deleted from my device.
Been using Thunderbird on my PC for over twenty years so was keen to make the switch. I used the in-built feature to scan a code with the mobile and set up my accounts on there, but with one tweak. One of my mail accounts has a couple of domains mapped onto it and multiple account identities (the bit before the @), and that account is an old-fashioned POP3 type, everything downloaded onto my PC and not left on the server. So I changed the server settings for that account on Thunderbird on the phone to IMAP, just as I had it in p=p. Once emails arrive on the main PC I can’t view them on other devices, but that’s just the way I’ve always had it set up.
All seemed well at first, I was viewing incoming emails in TB on the phone, but after a week or so I was concerned at not having received emails from a couple of family members. When I spoke to one of them, they confirmed they’d sent me something during that time but I had no trace of it. So I asked them to forward me the mail again whilst I checked to see if it arrived on the phone. Nothing, but at that same time I was receiving emails on there from other sources. So I reopened p=p and lo and behold on a manual mail check the forwarded message from that one contact came through, all on its own, the other mails showing in TB not visible in p=p. Still that one email wouldn’t show up in TB on the phone, but I was then able to download it in Thunderbird on the PC. And what happened to their original mail a week earlier is a mystery, I never received it on any device. I’ve double-checked every folder on every device, including on the webmail system from the provider. There’s no junk mail settings on Thunderbird for mobile, I have no spam filters operational on the account and I was very careful from the moment I set the accounts up on TB on the phone to not accidentally delete anything and make sure there’d be no easy way to do that.
A couple of other mails I was expecting from personal contacts haven’t arrived and seem to have disappeared into a black hole, yet otherwise I seem to be receiving almost everything else as normal. I’ve verified the account settings in Thunderbird against those in p=p. In the latter, I had background sync set to Auto-Sync, and so set the same initially in Thunderbird. I then changed it in TB to Always. I no longer had p=p running, even in the background, yet another new email from the same contact wouldn’t show up in TB, so on another manual check in p=p there it was. In p=p I then changed the background sync to Disabled, after which that mail finally showed up in TB.
I can’t fathom out why only mails from one contact were going to p=p, which wasn’t even running. It wasn’t only mails to one account identity, other mails to the same identity were received in Thunderbird. It was just one sender which seemed to get differentiated. Now that I’ve disabled sync in p=p I’m hoping that’ll be the end of the matter, but if it was never running anyway…
And it still doesn’t explain what’s happened to at least a couple of completely vanished mails from two senders in the last week.