Bug 60508

Summary: When receiving from maildir, cancelling the receive nukes the entire source maildir
Product: [Applications] kmail Reporter: John Clark <jwclark>
Component: generalAssignee: kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: grave    
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Mandrake RPMs   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description John Clark 2003-06-30 02:56:31 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.1)
Installed from:    Mandrake RPMs
OS:          Linux

Hi all,

I have used kmail exclusively for the past 2 years also and love it. However, I just discovered a "feature" that enabled me to lose all the emails that I had yet to receive over the past 2 1/2 days.

Due to regular problems with fetchmail, I switched to getmail which works well. I configured getmail to dump all the mail from my various POPs on the 'net into a single Maildir (which happens to be located in ~/.getmail/incoming)

(by the way, this maildir is NOT under ~/Mail... I couldn't make out from the scant documentation on the "receiving from Maildir" feature in kmail whether kmail preferred this or not - my concerns about locking caused me to decide to put it outside ~/Mail).

Anyway, I have configured kmail to receive mail from this maildir, filter it with spamassassin and dump the (ham) messages into my inbox (I get lots of spam, so I'd die without spamassassin).

This has worked really well for a few weeks now.

After a weekend away, I returned, started kmail and invoked the receiving process - 420 emails started being received and spam-filtered (as per normal after a weekend away). Using spamassassin via a kmail filter can take a while and loads up the processor a little, so I knew it was going to spend a while chewing over all those emails.

However, I then realised that there was something else I wanted to do urgently on my PC, so I thought "no problem, I'll just cancel the receiving process on kmail". So I clicked on the "X" next to the receiving progress indicator (after only 5 or 6 emails had been processed). 

BAD MOVE!

When I later clicked on "get mail" to receive the remaiing emails, to my horror I found that all the mails in "!/.getmail/incoming" had been nuked by kmail! - must've happened when I cancelled the last receive.

This "feature" is not nice! Any chance it could be made a little nicer. I don't like having my mail sent to a black hole just because I want to cancel a receiving job.

Thanks in advance for a solution,

John
Comment 1 Ingo Klöcker 2003-06-30 15:49:23 UTC 
Ouch. That's really a pretty severe bug. I've already fixed it locally and will commit the fix later 
this day. 
Thanks for reporting the bug and I hope you didn't lose any important messages.
Comment 2 John Clark 2003-07-01 01:32:48 UTC 
Subject: Re:  When receiving from maildir, cancelling the receive nukes the entire source maildir

The beauty of this bug is that I have NO IDEA whether or not I lost any 
important emails - I never got to see them! I dare say there were some 
important ones in there - but what can I do about it except have a cup of tea 
and relax...!

Thanks for getting onto the bug.

Cheers
Comment 3 Ingo Klöcker 2003-07-01 02:11:45 UTC 
Subject: Re:  New: When receiving from maildir, cancelling =?iso-8859-1?q?the=09receive=20nukes=20the=20entire=20source?= maildir

The fix will be in KMail 1.5.3.