Re: [Evolution] Evolution fails to see some messages in Inbox

[Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh pacbell net>]

I've had a short exchange with Patrick O'Callaghan off list; this is my
reply to his latest, which may be of general interest.

I have caused some confusion by not making it clear that my copy of
Evolution runs stand-alone; i.e. it gets it mail from a POP server and
sends mail to an SMTP server.  There are no other mail servers involved.

On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 08:52 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 23:12 -0700, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 17:11 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:

POC:
> > > 1) Stop Evo completely ("evolution --force-shutdown")
> > > 2) rm -f ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.ev-summary
> > > 3) Restart Evo
> > >
> > > According to http://www.go-evolution.org/Camel.Local, the .ev-summary
> > > file indexes all the messages in the folder. If that doesn't work, try
> > > removing ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.ibex.* as well (which index the
> > > contents of messages).

JR:
I just deleted all of the files Inbox.ev-summary* and Inbox.ibex.index*.
When Evolution was restarted, it recreated them all apparently
successfully.  However the original problem remains, namely nothing
shows up on the message summary window earlier than Sept 11 2007, but I
can find earlier messages by searching the account though not by
searching the folder.

If people are interested, I can post logs of the restart, which was
done from a terminal.  I can't send the Inbox file because it's pretty
big (179 Megabytes) and because it contains private correspondence.
However I'll be glad to look into this however I can.

JR:
> > BTW: Can you enlighten me about the file layout in the .../local/
> > folder?  For example:
> >
> >  $ ll Inbox*
> > -rw------- 1 jonrysh jonrysh 186272178 Jul  1 22:14 Inbox
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 jonrysh jonrysh       267 Jul  1 22:17 Inbox.cmeta
> > -rw------- 1 jonrysh jonrysh   1460330 Jul  1 22:14 Inbox.ev-summary
> > -rw------- 1 jonrysh jonrysh    361809 Jul  1 22:14 Inbox.ev-summary-meta
> > -rw------- 1 jonrysh jonrysh   5219328 Jul  1 22:14 Inbox.ibex.index
> > -rw------- 1 jonrysh jonrysh  11714064 Jul  1 22:14 Inbox.ibex.index.data
> >
> > shows a number of files, in particular Inbox.ev-summary-meta that I
> > don't see mentioned anywhere.  I suppose I should delete this file also.
> > Is there much risk of permanent data loss as long is Inbox remains?  I
> > assume that these files will be regenerated automatically when Evo
> > starts.

POC:
> I assume the same (I'm not an Evo developer). The .ev-summary file
> apparently contains some message state information (e.g. Read,
> Replied, ...) which would be lost. Also be sure to do an Empty Trash
> before stopping Evo, to clean out the Inbox. I think the .cmeta file
> contains things like Evo's current screen coordinates, which isn't
> important.

JR:
> > > > It seems to be
> > > > about problems with evolution communicating with a server of some kind,
> > > > and to have advice about removing a folder called
> > > >          ~/.evolution.../exchange.  
> > > > My machine has no evolution server, and no such folder.  So it seemed
> > > > useful to put the email into the bug comments.

POC:
> > > That's because the bug is related to Exchange servers, which isn't your
> > > case.

JR:
> > I'm not very familiar with evolution internals (as you see), but I'm not
> > so sure that the bug has to do with communicating with Exchange servers.
> > Reading the comments (most of them) the bug seems not to be  well
> > understood.  Maybe (say) it has to do with very large folders, which
> > have only occurred so far on systems using Exchange servers.

JR:
> > Thanks very much for all the time you've put into this.

POC:
> No problem. I've been helped many times by other people on mailing
> lists.