GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 692315
Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync
Last modified: 2013-02-10 17:49:01 UTC
I'm using, or rather trying to use, version 3.6.2 that came with FC-18. I can't seem to work around the mismatch problem. I had been using Evolution 2.28, and occasionally it would do this Summary and folder mismatch thing. I don't know why. But to fix it, i would rename/mv the existing inbox in /var/spool/mail to something else. Create a new inbox that was empty. Restart Evolution. Delete all messages in the inbox (which where only in the evolution index, remember the new inbox was empty). Then i would "cat oldbox >>newbox" while evolution was running. Evolution would see the "new mail" and (re) build a summary index. Life was good for a month, sometimes 2, sometimes only a few days. I just installed Evolution 3.6.2 with FC-18. I can't get this to work... unless i nearly empty out my inbox. The old 2.28 version would occasionally flake out with over 1000 messages. This version, 3.6.2, can't seem to handle even 50 messages. This is intolerable! This new version is also blind to my old local folders. Thankfully, with "find" i can find them. So i know they are still there. But evolution 3.6.2 can't see the old folders from 2.28... and this after it rearranged everything to its own liking... automatically... without asking me! NOT nice! My setup: Everything is local delivery to one inbox in /var/spool/mail. Outbound is via sendmail (this part works). I have some 800 inbound aliases that all filter into one account. (i got the idea from a friend that used to send charitable contributions with a different middle name each time... this way he could see which organizations where selling his name to which other organizations). Of those 800 inbound aliases, only about 50 have corresponding evolution accounts for out going mail. (this is also not working well, but it's a different issue). Meanwhile this Summary and Folder mismatch thing is a nasty show stopper. HELP ! ! !
Created attachment 234204 [details] Inbox w/ 2 messages of junk mail I wiped out everything. So that the size of inbox was 0 bytes. Evolution was happy, inbox was empty. Turned off the anti-spam. Waited... Got 1 junk email... OK Got 2 junk email... OK Delete 2nd email... OK Got 3 junk email... Problem, "Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync". At the time there were only 2 short emails in the inbox. I am attaching that inbox.
The sequence was: Got 1 junk email... OK Got 2 junk email... OK Delete 2nd email... OK Expunged deletes... OK <-- i forgot to mention this Got 3 junk email... Problem, "Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync".
I've noticed something... So now i'm starting with a raw "inbox" of 19 messages in /var/spool/mail/username. These are all unread messages... because... the Evolution is "Unable to retrieve message", because "Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync". I will continue to call it "inbox" but this is really the raw /var/spool/mail/username file. So I edited that "inbox" with vi, and i deleted the first message in the "inbox". Then i saved it back into the same raw "inbox" file. Then i pushed the "Send / Receive" button in Evolution. To Evolution's credit it read the "inbox" and it looks like it (attempted to) rebuilt its Summary index. Now a funky thing happened. .ogg, I've seen this bug for such a .flac long time, i remember way back when it used to manifest itself with "duplicate" messages. At that time it was quite clear those "duplicates" where not really duplicate messages, but only duplicate entries in the Summary/index. Well, well, well... After i used vi to delete the first message from my current "inbox", and Evolution rebuilt its Summary in response to pushing the "Send / Receive" button, in the tree structure on the left side of the Evolution window, in bold, i see the unread message count as "Inbox(34)"... and then, then, it changes to "Inbox(18)", still in bold. Of course 18 is the correct count, but why for an instant did Evolution think it was 34 ? Same old bug, but now there is a cover-up going on. This is simple. Evolution is not parsing the inbox correctly. I realize this a royal pain in the chair warming part of the anatomy because mail senders are not always well behaved. But there has GOT to be a better way then gluing everything shut when one email is not exactly compliant. And as it seems that more and more emails are becoming lax in their compliance, this mail bug is going from an annoyance, to painful, to intolerable, to causing someone to go postal. How hard could this be? Seriously, every email starts in column one with "From " and ends with a blank line followed by another "From " or the end of the file. Worst case a wayward blank+From breaks an email into 2 fragments, or a missing "From " swallows a message into the tail of its predecessor. At least the problem would be localized and not scrog up the entire mailbox display. If a problem is sensed, flag the message, don't shut down the whole folder.
This is perfectly reproducible on a fresh installation. Evolution is unable to operate on standard Unix mboxes…
Ah, found it. It’s been fixed very recently. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 675287 ***