GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 415293
email retrieval fails with multiple account and many messages
Last modified: 2012-03-22 04:29:48 UTC
Please describe the problem: when retriving emails, all pop servers are queried at the same time. Then messages are retrieved and scanned by spamassassin. If you have several accounts and a lot of messages by account, the time spamassassin takes to scan the many messages of one account may make some pop server of another account time out. Evolution doesn't detect it and hang up forever in the retrieval process. Steps to reproduce: I have 7 accounts to retrieve emails from, each of them contains a lot of emails (several dozens), and I have configured a spamassassin filter to filter out spam. 1. start mail retrieval: all pop servers are queried at the same time. 2. see the progression bar: messages are retrieved and scanned by spamassassin not all account are retrieved at the same time. Rather 1 or 2 at the same time, the others are waiting. CPU usage is 100% due to spamassassin. 3. Eventually, most accounts are retrieved successfully, at least one of them is hanging forever in the middle of retrieval or in the expunging process. Actual results: at least one account is not retrieved and is hanging. I have to cancel it and I get an error message saying something like "cannot get message ID#: does not exist". I start the retrieval again and then it completes ok. Expected results: not to hang Does this happen every time? yes Other information: May be pop servers should be queried one at a time, or evolution should detect that they have timed out.
The actual error message translated into english is: "Error during emails retrieval. Cannot get message 45f02a55-00077a02-3dc240fb: input/output error"
I'm probably experiencing this bug on Ubuntu Gutsy as of today. It's a problem I've started to see with evo 2.11.x, not before. If I start email retrieval on a POP3 account with lots of mail, having spamassassin enabled, after ten messages or so I see the process stops and I've to cancel the operation manually. The message that is then showed me is "Cannot get message xxxxx: Message doesn't exists" (translated in italian). I guess there's something strange with this specific mail server ("tin.it"), because no other server exibit this behaviour. However, other mail clients work normally, so I expect this is indeed a bug.
bug 660615 might help if you want to cancel any operation in POP
Hi tsalomon, if you have time, could you please check again whether this issue still happens in Evolution 3.2.2 or 3.0.3 and update this report by adding a comment and changing the "Version" field and provide information about your distribution? Thanks a lot.
Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of Evolution.