If one could "copy" emails from Icedove's "search" results into a destination
folder and then manually delete them with the search-results popup, then the
problem of generating phantom emails that have the 12/31/1969 date in the
destination folder would be solved, but one cannot do so. There is only a
"move" function, and that is what is broken. The Mozilla bug describes this,
just as I observed in my original posting.
I also noticed that while performing "search and move" operations in Icedove
that obtained large numbers of hits (from tens to thousands) the move would
repeat itself from one to three times, resulting in a count of emails moved
that was a corresponding multiple of the number of emails actually moved. of
course, we can now deduce that the extra X*(n - 1) emails were in fact
phantom emails. Such phantom emails do not accumulate in any one destination;
they just disappear into one master phantom, The Phantom. That is confirmed
when the search and delete function finds a hundred hits or so, but only one
The Phantom ends up visible in the trash folder.
As these phantoms have a source in dateware rather than malware, we probably
don't have to worry about them any more.
