kmail 'goes to sleep'

[d selby]

I have multiple accounts (15) some quite high traffic (mailing lists)

I leave kmail running 247 checking mail at the default 1 min intervals, at first mail arrives as expected.

After 1 - 2 days I just dont get any mail, If I stop then restart kmail I get a ton of new emails.

It appears to go to sleep without any outward sign of problems. The status bar at the bottom still flickers that it is checking for new mail but none is received.

I tried to find a kmail debug mode but was unsuccessful :(

Dave

[Lothar Braun (typecast)]

Hi Dave,

thank you for reporting.

Did you ever recognise this problem when you had only a single account?

Kmail has a progress bar on the lower side of the window. It shows the progress of the current action that takes place (e.g. download of emails). What's on the progress bar when kmail stops receiving messages? Does it stop at a certain percentage (e.g. 20%)?

Do you have a connection that suffers disconnects (e.g. dsl-connections are disconnected every 24 hours)? Can you correlate the disconnections and kmail stopping to receive emails?

Best regards,
  Lothar

[d selby (kbmaniac)]

Wow that was a quick response !

I have always had multiple accounts so unfortunately cannot comment on single accounts.

The progress bar is 0% and flicks across as account are checked.

Something interesting - if I press the up arrow for more info, I sometimes get a stuck account, the mailboxes are checked and the info 'block' raises and falls but one or two accounts can seem frozen and do not go. If I stop and start kmail it cures the problem.

Could it be occasionally there is a problem opening a mailbox 60 X 24 = 1440 reads per 24 hr and when this happens that part of kmail sticks ?

As far as disconnections - no problem - my broadband has been down twice in the last 2-3 years (happy to say)

Hope this helps

Dave

PS experimenting with ...

#!/bin/bash

if [ -n "$(/bin/ps ax | /bin/grep ' kmail' | /bin/grep -v 'grep')" ] ; then
 killall kmail
 sleep 10
 kmail --display :0 &
fi

[Lothar Braun (typecast)]

Can you try to stop the blocking jobs (click on the abort-button in the info box). What happens when you do this?

Does KMail fetch mails from other accounts when you see a blocking job?

-- Lothar

[d selby (kbmaniac)]

I will try it and see, it will take a day or two :)
and I had better stop my re-start kmail cron job !

Dave

[d selby (kbmaniac)]

OK this is embarrassing :)

After enough problems for me to work out a cron bash script as a workaround kmail is behaving AOK.

I have run it for 3 days straight, all AOK,

OK I will run it for another 3 days and see.

Dave

... one of the few occasions when I WANT software to misbehave ... :)

[d selby (kbmaniac)]

kmail has been running for a couple of days now and it locked up on account 'kdepim' this did not seem to effect any other accounts but did stop incoming mail from 'kdepim'

The progress bar was empty 0% and the message below was 'preparing transmission from kdepim' (I have a screenshot but did not post it as I would guess its against rules :)

This has been stuck for the last 12ish Hours

Pressing the cancel red cross next to the status bar freed it to read in more mail.

However without the status bars constantly being displayed and flickering up and down accounts just quietly 'go to sleep'

Is there no 'abort account read' after say 5 mins timer within kmail ?

Cheers

Dave

[d selby (kbmaniac)]

A followup ...

OK the problem came back big time, within 2-3 hours of starting kmail around 6 accounts would be locked out.

In desperation I purged kmail, wiped all its accounts, re-installed & setup, reinstalled lots of apps in kmails dependency tree - same problem !

So in desperation I contacted my hosting company - 'err yep we have a problem - you are hosted in hong kong & we have cable damage, would you like to be hosted in the US ?'

Moved to the US & all is well now :)

Thought the followup may be useful - incidentally thunderbird did not suffer from this problem - must be an internal timing thing. Or maybe kmail just never times out and retries an account ?

Anyhow thanks for your help

Dave s

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This bug report is being closed due to your last comment regarding this being fixed. Thanks again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Feel free to submit any future bugs you may find.