GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 626889
folder summary problems, reappearing mails, unable to delete trash
Last modified: 2010-12-17 06:41:38 UTC
Hi. Not sure whether this is all connected,... I have enormous amounts of mail... each day I get about 4k mails, and in my hundreds of mbox folders are well over 15GB mail. What happens quite often are the following problems: 1) Folder summary missmatches that are not even cured after sync. Within evolution you get the nice "error when storing folder"... on stdout the error, that even a sync didn't help. 2) It also often happens that mails that were deleted long ago,.. reappear in their original folders. 3) It very often happens that expunging a folder fails (with (1)). 4) It often happens, that there are mails in the trash which cannot be deleted at all.... even after emptying the trash. Nothing helps usually,.. e.g. restarting... Only solution is to delete all meta files + folders.db... the recreation literally takes days (which I do not understand either). Cheers, Chris.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but we are happy to tell you that the problem has already been fixed. It should be solved in the next software version. You may want to check for a software upgrade. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 550414 ***
Well but then it's not really solved as it's claimed in that bug. Even during 2.30 I did the following: - Removed all non-mbox files from ~/.evolution/mail/local (that is folders.db, *.cmeta, *.ibex*) - Have them rebuild. The problem does not even go away for 1 or 2 days. #550414 talks about a corruption in the mbox itself and Srinivasa Ragavan thought about writing a tool to repair them.... Did that ever happen? Therefore reopening.
btw: I'm also using POP3... If you need further information, don't hesitate to ask.
See the question to you in bug 550414 (which exact version you are running).
On Sun, 2010-08-15 at 06:37 +0200, Thomas Mittelstaedt wrote: > Have you seen comment 154, > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550414#c154? I basically did the quoted thingy there (deleting all the meta-data files + folders.db)... which didn't help as I've wrote in bug #626889. > It suggests to just copy the affected folder to a new location, rename > the original and move the copy back. Apart from the fact that I'd only put limited trust in this (I mean as far as I understand the problem is that Evolution already managed at some point in time to corrupt production data, namely my mboxes)... it's nearly no doable for me... or it would at least take weaks ;) find ~/.evolution/mail/local -type f | grep -v ".cmeta" | grep -v "ibex.index" | grep -v ".ibex.index.data" | grep -v "folders.db" | wc -l 1258 So I have really _many_ folders (yes I know that I'm weird ;) ). And du --si -s .evolution/mail/local/ 34G .evolution/mail/local/ (subtract about 1 GB for the folders DB there). See my problems?! ;)
(In reply to comment #2) > Well but then it's not really solved as it's claimed in that bug. > > Even during 2.30 I did the following: > - Removed all non-mbox files from ~/.evolution/mail/local > (that is folders.db, *.cmeta, *.ibex*) > - Have them rebuild. > > The problem does not even go away for 1 or 2 days. What does not go away? Please describe exactly what happened after you deleted the meta data? Did you fully close evolution via evolution --force-shutdown, did the deletions properly and restarted?
>What does not go away? Please describe exactly what happened >after you deleted the meta data? Well after doing the deletion procedure I start regenerating the metadate (which I do manually by clicking all folders (and waiting until "Storing folder" has finished). This mostly worked without problems (I did the whole procedure already several times)... so I get no Storing folder problems, and my Trash is empty, etc. But soon after (usually just days) these well known problems come back, i.e. - Error while storing folder problem - Messages in trash that cannot be deleted - error while expunging folder >Did you fully close evolution via evolution --force-shutdown, >did the deletions properly and restarted? Of course.
(In reply to comment #7) > >What does not go away? Please describe exactly what happened > >after you deleted the meta data? > Well after doing the deletion procedure I start regenerating the metadate > (which I do manually by clicking all folders (and waiting until "Storing > folder" has finished). > This mostly worked without problems (I did the whole procedure already several > times)... so I get no Storing folder problems, and my Trash is empty, etc. > But soon after (usually just days) these well known problems come back, i.e. > - Error while storing folder problem > - Messages in trash that cannot be deleted > - error while expunging folder > Hmm. Can you run evolution under a debugger, e.g. gdb, or at least from a terminal and redirect the output to a file. Maybe, from that log somebody can figure out, what's wrong. What are the sizes of your mail folders. You said you have many folders, only specifying the sum total. Try to get the sizes of the individual mail folders to a reasonable number, let's say no more than 50 MB each. How do the mails get to your local mail directory. You mentioned that you use POP. Through filters? Through copying?
I can,... but what should I look for? At least I have (ATM) some undeletable files in Trash. >Try to get the sizes of the individual mail folders to a reasonable number, >let's say no more than 50 MB each. Well that's very difficult to do,... at least until Evolution does not add some special support for "archiving" folders. I've filed an enhancement for this just now: issue #627220 Evolution itself retrieves the mails via POP3... the only filter I use are those from evolution itself + piping it through spamc (but also via an evolution rule). Anyways... does somebody know now, whether there were every such bugs in evolution, that really corrupted the mboxes themselves? Or was this just "rumours" above? If there were no corruption,.. I'd simply try deleting the meta-data again,... and wait some time if it has resolved finally.
(In reply to comment #9) > I can,... but what should I look for? > At least I have (ATM) some undeletable files in Trash. > > >Try to get the sizes of the individual mail folders to a reasonable number, > >let's say no more than 50 MB each. > Well that's very difficult to do,... at least until Evolution does not add some > special support for "archiving" folders. So, how big are those individual mail folders? Maybe, you can use a utility like formail, part of the procmail package, to filter those large mbox files and bring them down to a reasonable size. Or take a look at the GNU mailutils, http://www.gnu.org/software/mailutils/manual/index.html. Apropos archiving support: Have you tried to use the other account types available in preferences, namely - "Standard Unix mbox spool directory". Try to create one of those accounts and experiment a bit. Hope that helps. thomas
All what you described sounds exactly what Akhil used as a master bug for your duplicate, aka I agree with Akhil. There is nothing more to be said until repeating myself or anyone else. You can also alternatively look at http://live.gnome.org/Evolution/FAQ#Why_do_I_get_an_error_.22Summary_and_folder_mismatch.2C_even_after_a_sync.22.3F but because you are doing things right, then I suppose you read it already, which is good. Apart of that, I didn't notice any reply for comment #4, but I'm pretty sure I didn't overlook it. Note that 2.30 is not the same as 2.30. Why? Simply because we have 2.30.0, 2.30.1, 2.30.2, 2.30.3, and probably your distro also adds some -1, -2... to it, resulting in 2.30.2-2 and so on. So what is your exact evolution version, please? If not sure, Help->About would help. Bug #550414 comment #178, do you notice the difference between 2.30 and 2.30? With respect of folder size, it's pity, but evolution couldn't handle mbox folders with file size larger than 2GB, it's a shame, and it was finally fixed recently (search for a fixed bug with 2GB in a summary, if interested). So when your folder grows "too much", then you may see other (or similar) kind of error when operating with it, so there is no other option than splitting your folder into more files with 2.30.x. The 2.32.0 will have this fixed. Though Thomas' idea about smaller files also makes sense, imagine deleting one message from your folder means rewriting whole 2GB file, by copying it to a new file and then renaming. There is some effort to change local store to use maildir instead of mbox, which stores each mail in a single file, so this and many other issues with mbox format would be "fixed" by a movement to maildir. But that's another story.
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!