Version: (using KDE KDE 3.0.5) Installed from: RedHat RPMs OS: Linux Hi, During mail sending Kmail uses some temporary files (i guess) this filename was in our case "1046439786.2449.wwDw\:2\,S". The result is that kmail is not working properly, we can not send mail and we can not delete mail. We can read mail. Our setup is SMTP/IMAP. Our NFS server is a large Dell NAS 775 with 800gig HD space and it's unfortunately Windows Powered. That implies that :\/<>? are illegal characters in file names. I will try to attach the Ethereal trace of the NFS trafic between the Redhat 8.0 machine and the NFS server. regards birger....
Created attachment 1075 [details] Ethereal trace of NFS traffic The error message from the Dell server is in message 1444 The filename sent from kmail is in message 1443 Use display filter: nfs.status !=0 and nfs.status !=2 to filter out all the other messages , the remove the display filter to se the surrounding transactions. regards birger....
Update The file name is 1046439786.2449.wwDw:2,S Not with the backslashes I used on the cmd line, sorry about that. regards birger....
Subject: Re: New: Using ":" in filenames is incompatible with some NFS servers (Dell and others that are Windows Powered) Those filenames are typical for maildir folders. If your NFS server doesn't like colons in filenames then you will have to use the mbox format for all your folders. As the current version of KMail defaults to maildir folders and therefore creates the five system folders "inbox", "trash", "outbox", "sent-mail" and "drafts" as maildir folders you have to create empty files with those names in ~/Mail before you start KMail for the first time. You can create those empty files for example with "touch ~/Mail/inbox", etc.
this workaround to use mbox folders instead of maildir is a very bad idea on a NFS server. While in general having locking sensitive data on a NFS share is imho a bad idea it is extremely dangerous to use mbox format instead of maildir format via NFS. The probability of total data loss is much more increased as mbox depends on proper locks while maildir is lock free. (think about partial writes due to a network outage) In addition the ':' character does not work for CIFS based home directories. So IMHO kmail should consider to offer an alternative character. You may have a look at http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html which describes some alternatives to '/' and ':'.
I also share this pain. I want to use KMail on Win XP via Cygwin, but those colons (:) in the "maildir" file-names prevent me from storing my "Mail" folder on my FAT32 FS! More people will soon want to use KMail on Windows (and share their "maildir" folders with their Linux KMail installation), so this issue really should be addressed soon. Does anyone disagree?
This problem still exists with KDE4.1
I can confirm this issue still exists. Maildir mails are still stored using the colon on 4.1.2.
*** Bug 189441 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
SVN commit 1013419 by mkoller: BUG: 55339 add a configuration option (MaildirFilenameSeparator; without GUI) to be able to change the maildir filename separator so that filenames can be created on FAT etc. filesystems M +7 -0 CMakeLists.txt M +7 -0 kmail.kcfg.cmake M +5 -17 kmfoldermaildir.cpp WebSVN link: http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=1013419
This bug is not completely fixed in KDE 4.8.5. I tried to activate the workaround, as explained in http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.devel.pim/26928 : I added to $HOME/.kde4/share/config/kmail2rc, in the section [General], the line MaildirFilenameSeparator=! and renamed all files named id:flags to id!flags inside the $HOME/.local/share/local-mail directory. Then, when I select a mail folder on the VFAT formatted USB-stick that is in maildir format, and perform the action "Mark all mails read" on it, then the log shows error messages like Maildir: Failed to rename entry: "MAILDIR/FOLDER/new/1345995993.R500.HOSTNAME" to "MAILDIR/FOLDER/cur/1345995993.R500.HOSTNAME:2,S" ! Error: "The argument is invalid" This error message comes from kdepim-runtime-4.8.5/resources/maildir/libmaildir/maildir.cpp method Maildir::changeEntryFlags, line 676. This method contains the code #ifdef Q_OS_WIN finalKey.append( QLatin1String("!2,") + mailDirFlags.join(QString()) ); #else finalKey.append( QLatin1String(":2,") + mailDirFlags.join(QString()) ); #endif In other words: For Linux users of maildir folders on NFS mounts (bug 55339) and of USB-sticks (bug 189441) the code still attempts to use the character ':' in the filenames. It should use a configurable default here as well. Please, can you reopen this bug report?
Move to kmail2
This is still an issue. When stored in maildir format, Kmail mail cannot be backed up to fat32 drive.
This bug has only been reported for versions before 4.14, which have been unsupported for at least two years now. Can anyone tell if this bug still present? If noone confirms this bug for a Framework-based version of kmail2 (version 5.0 or later, as part of KDE Applications 15.12 or later), it gets closed in about three months.
Just as announced in my last comment, I close this bug. If you encounter it again in a recent version (at least 5.0 aka 15.08), please open a new one unless it already exists. Thank you for all your input.