Comment 6 for bug 12906

Message-ID: <email address hidden>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 09:25:15 -0500
From: Albert Cahalan <email address hidden>
To: Margarita Manterola <email address hidden>
Cc: <email address hidden>, <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: Bug#295270: Please provide more information

> > I may have guessed the problem. I had less free disk space than the size of
> > the Inbox file, but not zero disk space either. I suspect that
> > evolution corrupts the mail files when this happens.
>
> Yes, this sounds like the reason of the problem. Thus, I'm retitling.
>
> > Of course, this should not happen.
> > Additionally, it ought to recover by regenerating the summary data and
> > index. I got it to recover by manually deleting several files; these
> > were then rebuilt.
>
> Ok, although I agree that what you experienced was not right, but I find
> that the bug was that the message was not clear enough.
>
> If your disk is full, you'll experience many many problems, you'll lose
> data and things like that. So it's not a good idea to have a full disk. I
> don't think that Evolution should find a way to delete the messages even if
> there isn't enough space, however, it should tell you what the problem is
> and let you fix it.

I'm not saying that evolution should be able to delete when there isn't
enough disk space.

Evolution failed even after I freed up plenty of disk space. It had corrupted
its database, and would not function again until I manually performed an
undocumented procedure of deleting the summary data file and index files.

The matter of a correct error message is secondary. The important thing is
that evolution not corrupt its data files.