All local folders lost in KMail

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi Peter.

Peter Humphrey - 14.08.19, 16:50:12 CEST:
> On Friday, 9 August 2019 16:05:30 BST you wrote:
> > Change of plan again; the overclocking made no difference, so I
> > followed various guides on the Web and interpreted them for my
> > Gentoo system.
> > 
> > I had to reinstall akonadi and qt-sql with USE=postgres, but after
> > setting up for pgsql I restarted akonadi, then reimported the mail
> > archive I'd remembered to make.  ;)
> > 
> > Let's see how it goes. Thanks all for your help.
> 
> Well, that was a disaster. I've now lost two whole days of e-mails.
> Postgres seemed to be faster than MySql, but at what cost!
> 
> I lost yesterday's mails because KMail decided it would save my daily
> archive under my home directory instead of in a separate partition
> mounted below there. So when I removed my home directory and created
> a new one, again, the archive was lost. One day down.

Well, when KMail archives to home directory and you remove that… that is 
the expected outcome, I'd say. I do not see how KMail/Akonadi would be 
responsible for that data loss.

> Today I had some more new mails waiting to be read, but I did
> something else first on another desktop and when I came back to KMail
> I watched in horror as it proceeded to delete all my folders and
> messages. Another day's mails lost.

I have really no clue what is going on on your system. And without more 
information I see not much of a chance to find out.

However, one thing I like to share (again, I mentioned it often in this 
list, cause it is really a classic) is:

Akonadi misconception #1: where is my data?

https://blogs.kde.org/2011/11/13/akonadi-misconception-1-where-my-data

Which basically means that your mails could still be in the filesystem, 
somewhere under '~/.local/share' usually, where is somewhere would be 
'local-mail' or 'akonadi_something_resource', at least for POP3. The 
resource configuration dialog in Akonadiconsole would tell the location. 
For IMAP they could theoretically still be on the IMAP server. 

It is really important to understand that before claiming that mails may 
be lost. Of course mails disappearing from KMail for no good reason 
would still be a bug, but it might (!) not be a data loss.


Some more of the information in such a data loss case would be:

1) What does 'akonadictl fsck' tell?

2) Do you see any significant messages when you start Akonadi from 
console?

3) Same with KMail.

4) What is your filtering setup. It is quite easy to setup up filters that 
might be destructive in certain circumstances. So what filters do you 
have defined (feel free to redact for privacy reasons).

5) I believe it is possible to enable some kind of a filtering log. Would 
be good to look there too what is going on.

6) Are those mails probably still in the source for the IMAP or POP3 
resource (for POP3 usually somewhere under '.local/share', but you can 
see in the resource configuration in Akonadiconsole).

Please understand that I do have a lot of other things more important to 
me, so I am currently not willing to describe in detail on how to gather 
this information, it would just take more time than I am willing to 
spend. So please see on your own how you can provide this information. 
Of course feel free to ask for help on this list. I just may not answer 
in a timely manner or at all. But there are others who can help as well.

In case you provided any of this information already, feel free to point 
me to it. From quickly scanning mails in this thread I did not see it.

Best of success,
-- 
Martin