GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 538716
Do not set expiration on POP3 message cache
Last modified: 2011-01-27 05:42:28 UTC
This is on Mandriva 2008.1 i586 with evolution 2.22.0 and evolution-data-server 2.22.0. Yesterday, evolution started downloading all 5800 mails from my POP3 account at gmx.net. I haven't accessed the mail account from anywhere else but this machine, but my internet connection was down for a moment, then it started to fetch all the mails again.
Please see http://www.go-evolution.org/FAQ#Why_does_Evolution_download_duplicate_emails.3F_How_can_I_get_rid_of_them.3F_Why_does_Evolution_reload_old_mails_from_server_when_.22Leave_a_message_on_the_pop_server.22_is_activated.3F
This should be fixed anyway inside Evolution. Other mail clients like Thunderbird don't have this problem.
That FAQ is in fact a list of bugs that should be fixed. 1. You have got several copies in your mailbox - no I don't. I have them now in evolution 2. The mail server supports the UIDL extension yet changes the message UIDs each session - this should be detected by evolution somehow and worked around 3. The mail server does not support UIDL (which means Evolution has to generate UIDs using md5sums of the message headers) but the server changes the message headers after download (usually adding a Status: or X-Status: header - Evolution's md5sum ignores these, but Evolution may be missing other headers that this particular server munges) - I don't know, how do I detect this? It could be worked around too. 4. $HOME/.evolution/mail/pop/cache-* files are not writable - no, they are writable just fine
> 2. The mail server supports the UIDL extension yet changes the message UIDs > each session > - this should be detected by evolution somehow and worked around The specifications says MUST NOT BE CHANGED, there is no way to detect this. #3 can obviously be worked around so long as we can maintain a full list of headers that different servers might change, the only way to find this out is to log your tcp traffic and see if there is a difference between the first time evolution sees a message on the pop server and some later fetch. Odds are low that this is the problem for you. Anyways, I'm going to reopen this because I think you probably really have stumbled on a real bug. The important bits of this bug report probably have to do with the internet connection going down and coming back up again, maybe the pop cache got out of sync? Gotz: I've had this problem myself but it has only ever happened to me (afaik) when I've run out of disk space and so I suspect that evolution was unable to save a log of which messages had been downloaded and ended up mistakenly clobbering the old log file. Could this have happened to you?
Jeffréy: I can rule out missing disk space, there's plenty of room on my home partition. How can I detect cache problems? Is there an error message to look for?
unfortunately not. one of the current evo-mail maintainers will probably have to get back to you after they get a chance to look over the code a bit and see if they can see anything that you could try that might help them debug it. I haven't looked at most of this code in years so I'm not sure I can really help :(
see bug 554154 , bug 539671 also
*** Bug 561862 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 622496 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 624537 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 539671 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 554154 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 174138 [details] [review] eds patch for evolution-data-server; bug #614388 comment #0 led me to this patch. The pop3 cache has set an expiration, which it shouldn't, as it's not a usual temporary cache, but real local storage for messages. Messages from it should be rather removed on demand, not after some period. The patch changes also one other thing, the message_time is not "inherited" from the previous one when trying to delete old messages from the server.
Created commit e1111c1 in eds master (2.91.3+) Created commit 066740d in eds gnome-2-32 (2.32.1+)
Independent of this patch (which seems plausible to me) I'd like to mention that the Evolution welcome mail (which was never downloaded from a pop3 server) was also duplicated in my case. So even though this fix may be correct, it may not be the fix for the bug of evolution duplicating existing mails (that have had already been deleted from the server and were duplicated locally). see Bug #624537
*** Bug 451779 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***