[Kolab-devel] Kontact/KMail randomly emptying folders?!

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Monday 23 June 2008 13:59, ITSEF Admin wrote:
> Over the past half year, we've had several incidences where users lost all
> mail in several folders of their accounts. We have a history of unreliable
> Calendar/Tasks folders here, but this is the first time I have seen this
> with "ordinary" mail folders. I was able to track down three cases so far.
> In all cases, the kolab server (imapd) reports that the mails have been
> deleted, i.e. it looks like the server has received some command to do so.
> All three users had their kontact running at the time and were out of the
> company at the time when the mails were deleted (example: one case happened
> on a Saturday night around 0:15h).
>
> All users with problems are running kontact proko2.1.x (currently 2.1.11)
> on SuSE 10.0. I have yet to see a comparable report from our five "pilot
> users", who are running enterprise35 on Kubuntu 8.04. As far as I can see,
> all users that ran into this had "pure" DIMAP accounts.

Mail loss happened to me once with Kontact proko2.1 over several years,
it clearly was the client that deleted the emails, but I was unsure how.
It could have been triggered by an incomplete imapd folder list or something 
similiar. (There have been very rare reports (one once a year) with 
Outlook/Toltec for unshared, shared folders which could have been explained 
by a Cyrus IMAPD missbehaviour as well.)
At intevation we might had another case recently, we are still investigating.

> I'm not sure how to handle this - clearly, something is wrong here, but
> it's vague. We already have quite extensive snapshots of our mail (four per
> day, plus thirty days, plus several weeks and months), which is how I was
> able to see what happens in the first place (those snapshots include the
> imapd logs, fortunately). Hence, as usual, any advice is most appreciated.

In the two cases I have seen, the loss was for complete (sub)folders and easiy 
recognised, it was also so rare that it could have a number of causes.
You could open an "neeg-eg" issue and we will try to gather more data to find 
out, if this is a Kontact or server issue and under which conditions it will 
appear. I guess that Proko2 should be phased out of production sometimes as 
well, so if the problem never appears with enterprise35, this is cool.


Bernhard


-- 
Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net      (Free Software Company)
Germany Coordinator: fsfeurope.org. Coordinator: www.Kolab-Konsortium.com.
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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