Re: vanishing messages and shaky connexions
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Wednesday, March 28 at 12:51 PM, quoth Greg Novack:
> Sometimes when I'm checking my email over my modem connexion, or on
> wireless in a coffee shop with a really shaky router, the connexion
> will cut out on me while I'm in the middle of dowloading (IMAP) a
> mail message to read (in Mutt 1.5.12). Mutt itself hangs, and all I
> can do is CTRL-Z. OK fine, no big deal ... but when I log in again
> and try to read that message, I can't get it. Specifically, Mutt
> tells me that it's of size 0K, and there is nothing in the body at
> all.
Ahh, yes, I've run into this before too, though my problem is usually
the result of beginning to download a giant multi-megabyte message and
then changing my mind and killing mutt to stop the download. What
happens in both cases, however, is the same. Mutt is dutifully
attempting to cache that message. Unfortunately, if it doesn't get
much of the message (say, none of it), it still creates the cache file
(it probably shouldn't). The cache file contains exactly what mutt
knew about the contents of the message at the time mutt died, which is
to say, nada. When you launch mutt again, however, mutt looks at its
cache and thinks "aha! I know what this message contains! nothing at
all!". Your message on the server is perfectly safe, it's just that
mutt thinks it has a local copy and therefore doesn't have to check
with the server for that message. Note that if mutt asks the SERVER
for info about that message (which it will do occasionally), the
server will tell it the truth, and mutt will think "ok, that message
is x bytes", but as soon as it's time to read the *body* of the
message, mutt trusts its cache over the server (idiotic, eh?).
The fix is simple: find and delete that cache file. It should be
pretty easy, too:
find /path/to/cache -type f -empty -exec rm {} \;
If that doesn't work (say, if the cached message has one or two bytes
in it), then just delete everything in mutt's cache.
~Kyle
- --
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that
you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-- Plato
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Thank you for using encryption!
iD8DBQFGCrN9BkIOoMqOI14RAuurAKDHN1YD8XLhgdgq+DJjZd5ZBzPJ3gCeNCJg
0vTL9HVWcMbNeefR8zycABI=
=YbQ7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----