kmail serious problems

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi,

On Dienstag, 7. Februar 2023 17:52:50 CET David Bryant wrote:
> On Tuesday, February 7, 2023 6:00:04 AM CST kde-pim-request at kde.org wrote:
> > I'm using this with a gmx account. I would assume this server is
> > maintained. I know nothing about UIDLs. Those duplicated emails cannot be
> > displayed (i.e. when clicking on them nothing happens), they always stay 
> > "unread" and I cannot delete them.
> 
> I am aware of this problem, and I have a work-around. I added it to the
> KMail documentation in Section 7, KMail Troubleshooting.
> 
> > Is there something I can do to help ?
> 
> Yes. Assuming that you are using mysql (aka mariadb) as your database
> engine, you can use the mysql program to remove the superfluous database
> rows. An analogous procedure should work with sqlite, if you're using that
> instead..
> 
> 
> First, open a terminal window and  find out how many records are lacking RID
> (remoteid) data:
> ~ $ akonadictl fsck 2>&1 | grep ^Found
> *Found* 5 external files.
> *Found* 5 external parts.
> *Found* no unreferenced external files.
> *Found* 0 parts to be moved to external files
> *Found* 0 parts to be moved to database
> *Found* 6 collections without RID.
> *Found* 17 items without RID.
> *Found* 0 dirty items.

I get this:
Found 1093 external files.
Found 991 external parts.
Found unreferenced external file: /home/alex/.local/share/akonadi/file_db_data/
44/2953744_r0
Found unreferenced external file: /home/alex/.local/share/akonadi/file_db_data/
59/2953859_r0
...
[skipping close to 100 lines]
...
Found unreferenced external file: /home/alex/.local/share/akonadi/file_db_data/
95/2953795_r0
Found unreferenced external file: /home/alex/.local/share/akonadi/file_db_data/
51/2954751_r0
Found 0 parts to be moved to external files
Found 0 parts to be moved to database
Found 1 collections without RID.
Found 760 items without RID.
Found 0 dirty items.


What about the around 100 "unreferenced external files" ?
Anything I could/should do about that ?

...
> I should add a few cautions. First, if you have created more than one
> address book you probably ought to back your address book data up to an
> external file. Address books in Vcard format are stored directly in the
> akonadi database, and they do not have an associated remoteid. So the above
> *delete *command will remove those address book entries -- you'll have to
> restore the secondary address book from the backup copy. I'm pretty sure
> that the Vcard address books are the only entities that have no associated
> remoteid data. Second, you will have to stop KMail (right-click, then say
> "quit" if it's running in the system tray) and restart it to force
> reloading of the mysql database files beefore the extraneous entries will
> go away.
> 
> 
> Just a word about why this happens. The basic email data are stored in
> ~.local/share/local- mail (on most Linux systems). The messages are  stored
> as separate files, with names like 1675709976831.R873.localhost:2,S, where
> the big long number refers to the time the message was sent, expressed in
> milliseconds elapsed since 00:00:00 01/01/1970. There's an "akonadi"
> directory inside ~.local/share -- ~.local/share/akonadi/db_data/akonadi --
> that contains the mysql database files. These are basically indexes that
> contain some metadata, plus pointers to the actual email files in
> "local-mail". I don't know exactly why, but sometimes, when a message is
> "filtered" to another folder besides inbox, a job to create the database
> entry is started more than once. Something goes haywire, and you end up
> with two database entries that refer to the same message. But only one of
> them points to the actual email message; the other one contains metadata
> about the message, but lacks the crucial information saying where to find
> the actual message.

Thanks a lot :-)
Alex