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

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

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.