Re: [Ifile-discuss] Where have my emails gone? :(

[Jack Bertram]

* Brett Nemeroff <address@hidden> [030321 18:23]:
> So I'm noticing more problems with scripts from Jack Bertram and Martin
> Macok on my system. :(

Oh dear! I hope we can help.  This isn't really an ifile issue so much
as an implementation issue, but no doubt people will tell us to take it
off list if it becomes irritating.

> So I was getting those cron reports before, now I've noticed that I'm also
> losing emails altogether! seems that they are missing in the .backupmail
> folder too (however it seems to be less incomplete).

Ok.  Do they get delivered in the first place, or are you losing them
through the first process of procmail?  I'm guessing that they're being
lost when you run refile.learn?  If so, you have definite problems.

> So I notice that in the refile.learn script that we check to see if there
> is a Learned to flag. If there is, we move it to a newly created folder
> ($FOLDER.new). I'm not entirely sure what goes on after that. Why is the
> $FOLDER.new part necessary?

Well, basically what happens is this:

- refile.learn copies the mailbox to .backupmail
- it calls procmail and feeds it the individual messages from the
  mailbox using formail
- procmail then has to "deliver" these messages to a different mailbox -
  - it checks to see if it was originally classified correctly; if so,
    just deliver it
  - if it was originally misclassified, but has already been relearned
    then it just delivers it
  - otherwise, it relearns it, adds a header to note this, and then
    delivers it
- in all cases, procmail is delivering this message to a new mailbox
  $FOLDER.new, which will end up with a copy of every message which was
  in the old folder, but with some of them with extra headers
- then, if there's any change between new mailbox and the old one,
  refile.learn copies the new one over the old one

Hence $FOLDER.new replaces $FOLDER

I suggest that you do the following:

- Don't put refile.learn back in your crontab
- Wait until you know you've had to move some emails
- Manually back up your mail spool
- Manually run refile.learn
- Check for differences with what you'd expect

It does seem like the problems are caused by procmail rather than the
ifile scripts.  It would be great if you could give some really detailed
debugging errors from following the above procedure, and then I'd be
able to make some more (hopefully) useful suggestions.

cheers,
jack


> 
> Any ideas what might be causing my emails to be deleted? I've turned off
> the cron job to prevent it from happening anymore; but is there any other
> way to get it all to work?
> 
> BTW, I would have replied to my previous posts to keep it part of the
> thread, and I would have liked to included my cron output, but all of
> those emails have been subject to this mysterious event. :-/
> 
> 
> Thanks for your help!!,
> Brett
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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