summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync

[Romano Giannetti]

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, eeepc 1005PE.

This is very similar to bug #27014, but in that bug we were said to open a new bug.

I have a directory with several mbox files feeded by fetchmail/procmail, and kept in sync within my machines with rsync. Sometime, after receiving mail, evolution spat the infamous error "summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync", and is unable to read the messages.

Fully stopping evolution (evolution --force-shutdown) and restarting it normally works. When it doesn't work, repeating it (stop and restart), sooner or later make evolution happy again. No mail is lost, the files are correctly stored, and all is well.

Please tell me which data you need, and I will be happy to send it. Thanks!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. The issue is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug the to the people writting the software (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME)

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

Could anyone point me to the upstream bug? Or should a new one be opened? I saw https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213072 but it says it's fixed (which is not, for me, at least).

[michael (michael-nuttycyclist)]

I have also suffered this bug for a couple of years. I am now on ubuntu 9.04 having upgraded through a couple of versions all of which experienced the bug.

I have several folders, plus a single "Unread mail" folder. I've just spotted that emails arrived over the last couple of hours are showing correctly in the folders, but not the unread mail folder, although I haven't had the synch error today. This means I missed them.

The last time I "resolved" the error was on saturday when I deleted just the ibex.index.data and ibex.index file for the folder showing the in the error log.

I have just taken the following actions (built from notes in previous bug report) which increased the number of mails in the "unread" folder by 23.

1. Set Evolution to Offline mode, exit evolution
2. Open terminal and run evolution --force-shutdown
3. cd ~/.evolution/mail
4. cp -r local local.ORIG
5. find ~/.evolution/mail/local/ -name \*.ibex.index -delete
6. find ~/.evolution/mail/local/ -name \*.ibex.index.data -delete
7. restart evolution and let index files rebuild.
8. set evolution to online mode.

[Canada Lee (lee-howard)]

I am using Ubuntu Karmic 9.10, and my Evolution is retrieving mail from google, hotmail and mail.com via pop3 protocol, and I have just had this problem as well for the last week or two...

I ignored the errors that came up...it's just until I went into the trash and noticed my mail ain't getting deleted...and when I try to expunge it...it can't...it errors...the first time, it cleared out most of it, except 3 mail...and when I selected those 3 and expunged, they were still there...then when I clicked on inbox and then back to Trash, all 26 that supposedly were expunged were back...

During all this time, my Inbox reported there was 1 mail unread...I could not find it...I even tried going to the next unread, and it didnt go nowhere.

I am about to try out what comment #3 says, and see if that resolves it.

[Canada Lee (lee-howard)]

I did as comment #3 said...and it appears to have worked...somewhat... It's sorted out some of the index I guess...there was nothing in my trash, I selected 40 odd to delete...went to trash and expunged them...bingo that worked...

But...my inbox still says 24 mail and 1 new...and I cant find that new mail...is there a seperate index saved totally somewhere else for new messages.

How can this PHANTOM NEW MAIL be dealt with now...maybe michael of comment #3 would know how to?

Thanks for those steps...I was starting to get duplicated mail as well...duplicated mail that was old...and I couldnt delete them...but once I deleted the original one...even thought the duplicates were still visible...once the deleted were expunged...those dupes were gone.

Just looking for a solution to the Phantom New Mail...only 1 of...cant find it...anyone? Michael?

[Canada Lee (lee-howard)]

False Alarm!!!

Those steps didn't help me... It appeared to for that ONE time only...

So maybe I have to do those steps every time I wanna run Evolution.

I noticed during the retrieving of email there were errors...went to me sent folder...thinking I need to lighten things because this email program cant handle complexity...and selected mails to delete...then went to Trash folder, thinking I'll expunge them now...as it worked after those 18 steps up above there...also thinking if Evolution doesnt have to make a decision whether to delete them at exit, I could do the thinking for Evolution and expunge them now...failed...all mail in the trash folder stayed there...and I got an error about Sent folder couldnt be stored etc etc...naturally thats where these mails in the trash came from, the sent folder.

While the mail was being retrieved the inbox was erroring...again about stored folder blah blah...

Cant we just delete Evolution, and whenever we wanna get mail just download and compile a new one...then delete it, then the next day download and compile it and so on...there are less steps involved in compiling right?

Would that work? Because if we leave it on here its just gonna screw up.

How about we all chip in 1 penny, and hire some programmer to sit down and fix this program...and when he's done an hour later pay him the $113,429,754.23 that he deserves!

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

Well, I still have the problem in Maverick for my mbox folders. On the other hand, I can have evolution working again simply by stopping it (exit the program and then, to be sure, issue "evolution --force-shutdown") and then deleting the folders.db file in the mbox directory.

It's a bit of an hassle, but not a disaster. If evolution simply rebuild the folders.db file each time a mismatch happens, I will never notice it... On the good side, I never had any problem with POP or IMAP folders. Just with locally-feeded (by fetchamail and procmail) mbox folders.

[michael (michael-nuttycyclist)]

Oh bother - the bug is back.

Following the steps I posted in #3, which were a cumulation of fixes from the previous bug report, I'd been ok and only getting the odd problem here and there.

I'm now getting this, and having to follow the steps in #3 several times a day! This really isn't acceptable, nor is the length of time this bug has been reported without apparent resolution.

The only thing I can think may have triggered my latest issues is that I realised my mail folders were getting pretty large, so started deleting some mails and then running an expunge; ~6000 unread mails (yes I do subscribe to several mailing lists and I want to keep the mails I have). I think it might be the expunge function that is triggering this!

Previously I had been using message filters to move incoming mails to relevant folders. In evolution this actually copies the mail and deletes the original (so an expunge will trigger for all these at some point). I have now deleted all filters so that incoming mail doesn't pass through the trash, and set up search folders instead. Incoming mail is fine, but 5 times out of 10 when I click from one search folder to another I get the file and folder mismatch, am obviously not seeing the correct mails, and have to follow #3 above to rebuild the indexes without losing my mail.

Does anybody else have any ideas? Evolution is the only mail client I've found that I like on ubuntu, so would rather that this be fixed than I have to try something else!

[michael (michael-nuttycyclist)]

ok, I did a fair bit of digging around in sqlitebrowser looking at folders.db in the mail/local directory. I could see the mails arriving, the deleted field changing from 0 to 1 following deleting the mail in evolution, and then the record in the table being removed following an expunge.

I also noticed a deletes table that had ~11,000 records but never cleared down.

On browsing through my mailbox mail by mail I noticed one mail that had a duplicated subject/received time, and a message body saying that message 3870 in local/inbox could not be displayed as the folder was irrecoverably corrupted. I couldn't track this message down in sqlitebrowser.

I've had a few more instances of this "bug", so having researched more I added a step to #3 above.

1. Set Evolution to Offline mode, exit evolution
2. Open terminal and run evolution --force-shutdown
3. cd ~/.evolution/mail
4. cp -r local local.ORIG
5. find ~/.evolution/mail/local/ -name \*.ibex.index -delete
6. find ~/.evolution/mail/local/ -name \*.ibex.index.data -delete

6a. delete ~/.evolution/mail/local/folders.db

7. restart evolution and let index files rebuild.
8. set evolution to online mode.

I was wary of doing this as the database shows mails marked read etc, However, having let the index files rebuild my mailbox looked as it was before :) More interestingly the new folders.db file was only 4.5mb instead of the previous 10.1mb.

Also the deletes table has vanished when I browse the database! I wonder if the error was an upgrade through the various versions?

I'll update this bug report next time I get a file/folder mismatch error.

[michael (michael-nuttycyclist)]

That's interesting. No problems, but Evolution has just decided to download 800 duplicate emails from my pop3 account...

[Eus (eus-member)]

I am using Maverick 10.10. The bug is still there, even after 3 years. Is it a difficult bug or so?

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

Confirmed, it happened just five minutes ago in Natty. Exiting evolution, deleting folders.db and restarting solves the problem.

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

Still here in Oneirc. Now the added problem is that the folders.db files are scattered around, so you need to "rm -f $(find .local -name folders.db)" or something similar to start recovery, which then lasts hours (evolution try to rebuild all the folders for all the mailbox in parallel, so I have 100 tasks even if only 2 cores...)

Horrible. If only thunderbird could read mbox directory, served by an external program, I would switch now. Really there is no decent MUA for linux...

[Romano Giannetti (romano-giannetti)]

Still here in Pangolin. I have a full set of folder, index and cmeta files available if someone wants (I have little hope) to dig into it. It may have personal information, so I prefer to send it to the developers privately.

[Jörg Frings-Fürst (jff-de)]

Change status to Fix Released (see gnome-bugs)