[Sussex] Is this a bug (kdepim/kmail)?

[John D.]

On Sunday 11 March 2007 11:57, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> John D. wrote:
> > Morning list,
> >
> > Friday evening, I was doing my weekly update. In the middle of the
> > process my ISP/service dropped (took me a couple of minutes to work
> > out what was happening).
> >
> > I left things alone until yesterday morning when the service had been
> > restored (might have "come back" earlier - but as it was VVV late on
> > the friday evening.......). The update process seemed to work fine
> > and all was
> > restored - or so it seemed.
> >
> > When I started kmail (set up so that I only get an icon on the task
> > bar when theres mail awaiting attention) I noticed that the first
> > message was showing no sender, no subject and no text. Ok thinks me,
> > I'll delete that. On deletion the highlighted bar drops to the next
> > message and changes from showing a sender, subject and text to the
> > aforementioned no sender/subject/text.
>
> This is related to foolish, foolish mail clients that maintain their own
> internal database of message charasteristics, and rely on this to
> accurately match the contents of the server end. This is generally fraught
> with peril.
>
> > This happened a couple more times before I figured that something was
> > wrong.
> >
> > After digging around, I found a couple of other mentions of similar
> > problems, but only in a few other instances (long time ago or
> > different distro or different version of kde etc etc).
> >
> > I tried the obvious of uninstalling/reinstalling the app,
> > re-uninstalling then running apt-get clean/apt-get autoclean/apt-get
> > update/apt-get -f install (plus a few other commands that I don't
> > recall). To no avail.
>
> It's probably not the app, it's your locally saved mail datase. The message
> numbering got out of sync with the server's: I find the easiest solution is
> to backup the loal account files or settings, delete the account, and
> re-add the account in the mail client.
>
> It's an almost inevitable problem of software that maintains numerous
> chunks of individual data in single massive files: keeping that data
> indexed correctly is an adventure. It's also one of the reasons I strongly
> prefer Maildir to mbox based mail servers. Smaller, individual files are
> safer to back up and less likely to mess up other messages.
Thanks for that probable diagnosis Nico, 

It gives me a few things to read up on so that I understand more (I don't 
consider myself the "LUG nugget" for nothing :D ).

Not sure if I could actually get away with changing to a Maildir based system 
though as it would appear that the only one that will sync with my Treo 650 
is kmail/kontact (hum? I wonder if theres anything I could do with 
evolution - or if it's Maildir or mbox based ??).

Again, TVM for the response. Very much appreciated.

regards

John D.