Re: Balsa can't download a mail with a long line, gets stuck in endless dup-creating loop.

[Rob Landley <rob landley net>]

On 10/22/2012 03:29:13 PM, Pawel Salek wrote:
> Rob,
>
> thanks for reporting the issue. I believe the attached patch should
> address the issue you see.

Thanks, if I can ever get balsa to build from source I'll try it. (I'm  
still using the one in xubuntu.)

I tried the git instructions on http://balsa.gnome.org/git-help.html  
but there isn't an "./autogen" in the git directory (nor a  
./configure), so I downloaded the most recently release tarball which  
at least had a ./configure, and it complained about missing  
dependencies. So far I've installed intltool, libgmime-2.6-dev,  
gmime-bin, libgtk2.0-dev, libgtkhtml3.14-dev, libesmtp-dev, and  
libnotify-dev and it's _still_ complaining about missing dependencies.

That's about the point at which I lost interest, but it looks like I'll  
have to get back to it because balsa is... sort of unfinished?

When you cut and paste text, the window doesn't scroll. The first email  
I sent had a typo in the smtp configuration and "send queued" seems to  
be a complete NOP, so there's an email message in my outbox which just  
won't send.

I've since gotten a test message to send, but that didn't flush the  
pending message in the outbox. And of course when you double-click a  
message in the outbox, it brings up a viewer instead of an editor  
(kmail got that one right 5 years ago), so I can't re-send it. I tried  
taking off the exclamation point flag it put on it, and switching it to  
"unread", but it makes no difference...

> BTW, have you considered accessing gmail via IMAP and copying messages
> this way?

I tried that first. It didn't work.

This may have had something to do with the fact that adding filters  
based on list-id seems to be a NOP (all lower, all upper, matching  
capitalization to what's in the message, with/without the trailing  
colon...), so I could never get any of them to trigger and move  
messages into local folders so I can read my mail when not connected to  
the net.

I got POP to actually download them locally, and then wrote a python  
program to organize them into the appropriate mbox files. (I have to  
exit balsa to do this. I have yet to figure out how to tell balsa to  
rescan all its mboxes to figure out which new messages.)

Oh, and if you delete an mbox using the menus, balsa launches some  
external program beginning with an a (apoxis?) which eats 100% cpu for  
a minute or so and then balsa crashes. I deleted the temporary mbox  
files from the command line and it seemed happy.

Rob

> /Pawel
>
> On 10/22/2012 07:33:01 PM, Rob Landley wrote:
> > I'm attempting to switch over to balsa (the version built into  
> > current
> > xubuntu lts, 2.4.11-1), and download a year or so of archives off
> > gmail via pop3. Since gmail only gives ~500 messages per pop session,
> > I told it to check mail once a minute and left it running overnight.
> >
> > When I get up, it's stuck in an endless loop appending duplicate
> > messages to my inbox, because one of the messages won't download and
> > in that case it drops the connection rather than calling quit,  
> > meaning
> > none of the messages are deleted off the server, so it re-downloads
> > them (and hits the same error again) next time.
> >
> > (Pause to write quick python program to detect/kill duplicates in  
> > inbox.)
> >
> > A couple complicating factors:
> >
> > 1) The error message pops up in two xfce bubble that go away again in
> > about 3 seconds.
> >
> > 2) The message number it's complaining about is only identifiable via
> > the pop interface, not via gmail's web view.
> >
> > (Pause to write quick python program to download a batch of pop
> > messages and write them to numbered files.)
> >
> > I use said python program to delete the batch of mail it couldn't
> > download (but which I copied to separate files; it's from september
> > 2011 anyway), and set it downloading again. It gets up to february of
> > this year, and does it again.
> >
> > This time, I caught the line of text it was complaining about, which
> > starts with ">> Ethtool", and the word "Ethtool" is not in message  
> > 129
> > (as it said) but message 126 in the batch, which is attached.
> >
> > I can't control what people on linux-kernel send me. Is there any way
> > to fix balsa?
> >
> > Rob