Re: Critically awful failure in KMail/Kontact

On Wednesday 24 March 2010 20:12:28 Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 March 2010, Alexander Harrowell wrote:
> > OK. running KDE4.3, I tried to set up a Disconnected IMAP account for
> > my Gmail account, and watched it begin to slurp all the accumulated
> > mail from the last 6 years (and the imported stuff back to 1999).
> > 
> > Two things; first time out, Kontact crashed part-way through.
> > Resuming the job, I set up the folder descriptions, and decided to
> > remove the old online IMAP account. Removing the account icon
> > deleted all the folders on the server - no warning.
> 
> How did you "remove the account icon"? As far as I know, accounts can 
> only be removed via the Settings dialog.
> 
> 

By right-clicking the icon for that account in the Folder pane and choosing 
"delete" - I expected that this would remove it from the client. Not the 
server. A warning might be good.

> > Secondly, today, I had it slurp all the e-mail again. It did so,
> > eventually. After the synchronisation was complete, I set up a new
> > folder structure and some filters to reprocess the e-mail into the
> > new folders, opened all the groups in "All Mail", selected
> > everything and chose "apply all filters" - after about the first
> > 1,500 messages had been filtered, Kontact crashed with signal 6.
> > 
> > Relaunching Kontact, I discover...NO TRACE OF THE ACCOUNT. Nothing,
> > it seems, had been stored! Presumably the entire IMAP cache was in
> > RAM
> 
> Your assumption is incorrect.
> 

That may well be so, but my time is still wasted and my data is still gone.

> 
> > - no wonder it's crashy, btw.
> 
> If it crashed due to running out of memory then you should have noticed 
> an awful lot of swapping before the crash occurred (unless you do not 
> have a swap partition).
> 
>

Come to think of it, no, there was no swap activity that I noticed. It's 
possible that it was an entirely normal Kontact crash, which happens at least 
once a day. It was much more stable in KDE4.1.
 
> > Checking in the /dimap/ folder confirms that there is nothing there.
> 
> Are you sure that there are no hidden files or folders?
> 

Checking this, I find that the indexes are indeed present but hidden (and 
hidden from KMail). However, there's no sign of the data as opposed to the 
index.

> > This is really awful, both the crashiness and - worse - the "oops,
> > why not do it all over again" carelessness with data. I mean, how
> > long would I have had to keep it running before it thought to write
> > my data to disk?
> 
> The data is written immediately to disk, but it might be that the 
> account settings are not written immediately to disk after the creation 
> of the account. I suggest restarting Kontact after the creation of the 
> account.
> 

I rarely need to restart Kontact, it crashes sufficiently frequently that this 
would be superfluous.

-- 
The only thing worse than e-mail disclaimers...is people who send e-mail to 
lists complaining about them

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