Re: kmail corrupts emails

[Randy Kramer <rhkramer@gmail.com>]

On Friday 23 September 2005 04:16 am, Theo Schmidt wrote:
> Help! As I write, kmail is generating lots of unkown subject, unknown date,
> unknown everything mails and lots of my old mails seem to be corrupted,
> mainly headers gone.

Well, a little bit like the 2nd problem.  Re the first, is kmail generating 
those emails automatically, or are you generating them and they get sent out 
with unknown subject, ...?

Anyway, the problem I had/have stemmed from using kmail on two different 
machines with the mail stored on one machine.  The bottom line, if I wasn't 
careful, I'd try to access (old) mails with the indexes from the wrong 
machine.

My solution:
   * I'm very careful about using kmail from both machines, in fact, normally 
I make sure I only run kmail from one machine at a time
   * the solution to my problem is typically to regenerate the indexes.  To do 
that, I go into the mail directory (.Mail, iirc, although you may have it 
somewhere else), delete the existing indexes, and let kmail regenerate them.

It's been a little while since I've had to do that, can'd recall if I shut 
kmail down while I did that or not.  In any case, the index for a particular 
folder will be regenerated when you try to access that folder (from within 
kmail)--there will be a (fairly short, iirc) delay while the index is 
recreated.

Here, from directory ~/.Mail, is the ls -al listing for one (mbox) folder 
(named tldp) with the three indexes.  To start, you might want to experiment 
with just one mail folder.  Delete all three of the .index files, then 
restart kmail (assuming you shut it down) and try to access the mail in that 
folder.  After a short delay, I'm hopeful that it will be ok.

-rw-------   1 rhk rhk   868526 Sep 19 16:05 tldp
-rw-------   1 rhk rhk    99043 Sep 19 16:05 .tldp.index
-rw-r--r--   1 rhk rhk      937 Sep 19 16:05 .tldp.index.ids
-rw-r--r--   1 rhk rhk     5425 Aug 24 07:28 .tldp.index.sorted

hope this helps,
Randy Kramer



> I can't find anything on the internet. Anybody come across this?
> Suggestions?
>
> Please copy any answer to schmidt at umwelteinsatz.ch
>
> Theo Schmidt