SOLVED: Balsa crashing and losing messages?

Message

genterminl · Post by **genterminl** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 11:37 pm

Over the past few weeks I have noticed several times that after deleting several messages, when I click the menu Mailbox/Expunge Deleted Messages, Balsa just disappears. No error message - just gone. The last time I did it, I paid more attention when I restarted, and not only were the deleted messages gone, but some messages that were deleted from the inbox because I had moved them to another mailbox (local mbox file) were NOT in their new folder either - completely gone. I have no idea how many messages I have now lost over the past few weeks.

Has anybody seen anything similar? Any suggestions on how to test/confirm without trashing my mail? I thought I had previously performed these actions OK, but I wonder if I've had the problem since my last upgrade? (May 10,2008)

Balsa 2.3.22, amd64, and I'm also using popfile 1.0.1, and I don't see any of the missing messages there - I think I need to increase the retention time of th history.

Any suggestions for troubleshooting?

sargek · Post by **sargek** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 12:45 pm

Perhaps you can start Balsa from a terminal and when it crashes it may display the output in the terminal. I don't have an explanation for the lost messages though, sorry.

genterminl · Post by **genterminl** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 10:30 pm

Until I figure out the missing messages, I'm not going to try to crash it on purpose. However, I have just noticed something very strange, which is probably related. Short version - some of my mailboxes seem to have "=46rom" instead of "From" on the first line of the message. I don't think I see any of those messages in balsa, although I see other (always earlier?) messages in those mailboxes. It is possible that those are all my "lost" messages.

Longer version - I started balsa, and there were 7 old messages in the inbox. I fetched 13 new messages. 9 of them got correctly moved to another mailbox by a filter. I read them in that mailbox and deleted them. The inbox still showed 4 unread messages. I closed balsa, and restarted it, and there were only the original 7 messages in the inbox. In hope that balsa had not yet actually overwritten the inbox, I copied /var/mail/jack to /tmp/jack and closed balsa again. Those two files were identical - but opening one in emacs, it appeared to actually include the "missing" messages. I then copied that file into my mail directory as xxx

Restarting balsa, the inbox still showed the 7 messages, but xxx showed up as a new folder - but with only 1 message - the first one in the inbox. It looked the same, but the listed length was much longer (possibly the full length of the file?). I then created a new, empty folder yyy, and moved that one message into the new folder. I closed balsa - and the xxx file was 0 bytes (empty). The yyy file was identical to /var/mail/jack - except the "From " at the beginning of each message had changed to "=46rom". I don't know if this is a symptom or a red herring (an irrelevant finding, if you don't know that phrase).

However - one additional hint. The last of the 7 messages in the inbox produces this error to stderr "** Message: conversion windows-1252 -> utf8 failed: Invalid byte sequence in conversion input" and a longer version as a popup. If balsa doesn't correctly know where the end of that message is within the file, could it not find the beginning of the next message? This is looking more likely - as looking in the file, that message is base64 encoded, and manually extracating it produces what balsa shows - but balsa then continues with gibberish, as if it's trying to base64decode right into the next message. The relevant headers seem to be:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Class: urn:content-classes:message
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

How can I convince balsa where the end of the message is?

sargek · Post by **sargek** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 3:42 pm

The good thing about Balsa is that the messages are stored in mbox format and can be read by any text editor. If you find the files representing your "lost" messages, you can save them. As for the other issue, it looks like a character set conversion issue to me, but I am not very experienced with character set issues. Can anyone else shed any light on this issue?

genterminl · Post by **genterminl** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 4:01 pm

That's what I thought. I just looked up the mbox format (wikipedia) and if a blank line followed by a line with "From " should be taken as the beginning of the next message, the either there is a hidden character (not shown by emacs) or balsa is somehow getting confused. /var/mail/jack and /home/jack/mail/xxx are identical files, but balsa shows 7 messages in the inbox, but only 1 in xxx. I would expect them to be read the same. Is there something magic about the inbox?

sargek · Post by **sargek** » Sat Aug 16, 2008 4:02 pm

genterminl wrote:That's what I thought. I just looked up the mbox format (wikipedia) and if a blank line followed by a line with "From " should be taken as the beginning of the next message, the either there is a hidden character (not shown by emacs) or balsa is somehow getting confused. /var/mail/jack and /home/jack/mail/xxx are identical files, but balsa shows 7 messages in the inbox, but only 1 in xxx. I would expect them to be read the same. Is there something magic about the inbox?

I am not sure, but I don't think so. The times I've used Balsa the inbox was just another mbox file like all the other mailboxes. I could be wrong though...

genterminl · Post by **genterminl** » Sun Sep 07, 2008 11:14 pm

Solved: I posted on the Balsa mailing list - and it turns out to be a bug in gmime. Upgrading to the masked version 2.2.22 (and deleting ~/mail/mbox/*) resolved the problem.