Early on I discovered the immediate cause--the 'tmp', 'new' folders are all missing from the different subfolders of the mail directory under ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail, and the problem may be temporarily overcome be creating these folders in all the missing instances--'category' folders --those you set up under 'local folders' may be missing as well (but the index files remain).

The question is, what causes this, as it happens quite frequently and takes about an hour to clean up in the morning. It seems as if it correlates with the fairly frequent akonadi crashes upon shutdown, i.e, shows up next day.

Would appreciate any insight into this, and would like to reduce|eliminate it if possible.

Thanks,
Joe

Hmm, strange. Never heard of this before.

Maybe another program other than KMail is accessing the mail directories.
Can you run akonadiconsole and check if there is any entry for mails? If there is select and click "configure" to check which path it works on. Is any of them working on ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail?

Thank you for your answer. I think that it may be difficult to recognize because I'm not doing a good job of describing it. The closest thing I could find ala Google is:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83209

which is a pretty old bug. What happens here is very similar, but on Lucid, fresh install (though it happened very occasionally on the older install) older hardware Athlon 64 3200+, Gigabyte GA K8NS pro, 1G RAM, assorted HDs, multiboot with 3 other KDE versions of Ubuntu, one GDE version, one old MEPIS, dialup with serial modem (often a problem) so Internet connection is sporadic. Akonadi frequently crashes on shutdown, in spite of giving it extra time, and it appears to happen after an Akonadi crash the previous evening when shutting down, though it's not a 1-1 mapping, as Akonadi crashes on shutdown much more often, usually harmlessly.

From the bug report, I had gotten the idea that it might be well-known and have some simple workaround.

I will check as you asked and post what I find; I really don't use most of the stuff that is correlated with Akonadi, no Strigi, etc., and with the address book being so difficult to use, I don't use that anymore, either.

Thank you,
Joe

That bug report definitely sounds like the problem you describe.

Aside from the fact that KMail should handle this more gracefully (see also http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124111) the question is how this happens in the first place, i.e. what caused the directories to disappear.

Did you do anything like restoring a backup?

Cheers,
_

No, actually, I have only found this to happen after booting the machine in the morning, having shut it down the previous evening. It has happened twice that it deleted them again immediately, but that is ambiguous, since it is necessary to shut down KMail to get it to register any local folder which had been deleted entirely (except the index files), and I'm not sure what occurred in the interim. Though I /think/ that it is the case that Akonadi has crashed the night before in these cases, those crashes on shutdown are common enough without causing the KMail loss that I can't be at all certain of a correlation.

The usage on this machine is very ordinary--email, web-browsing, my wife plays the Mahjongg-like KDE games, occasional OO use, and some graphics editing. Not time for a lot else. The only things I backup, and that by merely copying, are financial files. Once it seemed as if it might have been the result of an upgrade, but that didn't prove out.

I did download and install Akonadi Console and will check that out soon.

Thanks,
Joe

Sorry to be so long in replying, other things go haywire, of course, as well.

KMail is still doing this; did it the day before yesterday and today. It really is bizarre the way it wipes out some of the default folders, such as inbox, as well as some of the ones that I have created.

I checked out the Nepomuk/Strigi settings in Settings, found that somehow, it was once again enabled--I thought I disabled it, but perhaps I only excluded all the folders from indexing.

I ran Akonadiconsole but couldn't see anything that made sense to me. Mostly it was blank. The only things I saw that puzzled me were that it reported Nepomuk as conflicted or something like that--that was how I found it to be enabled, even though all the files were excluded-- and the other thing was no address book plugin configured, but that apparently refers to a machine on a network with an IMAP server.

I think I recall seeing some forum guru saying that Nepomuk should NOT be disabled, or bad things would result. Perhaps that is how it got set up that way, and I have forgotten doing it. At all events, it hasn't apparently fixed the problem, nor did disabling it. So far, I haven't seen any new effects of disabling Nepomuk.

Thanks for any input.

I've never seen this happen, and this is sheer guesswork, but examine all your KMail settings. There are settings for subscriptions, local and server. If you have only some folders activated there that could explain why you don't see the others.

I had previously, I thought, posted an answer, but as I see it not, must have failed to click on the 'submit' button.

So, @annew, I cannot find such settings as those to which you refer, and this may be due to the fact that, as mentioned earlier, I am on dialup, and thus not networked with anything. (We have an another, older, computer, 14 yrs, which is slow enough on Lucid that it would be insanity to set up such a connection, so I have not connected it to this one.)

To reiterate, the problem is that KMail deletes the 'tmp' and 'new' folders (and in some cases, the 'cur' and even the named folder) for any of the local mail folders. This has happened three times in the past six days, and requires re-creating all of these before KMail will open, once more.

I refer you to the bug report mentioned earlier in this thread--it seems to be a fairly old problem, dating back prior to 2008, judging by the date of the bug report.

I think that I now have enough experience with it to make a reasonable guess as to the process, but not as to how to avoid it. KMail seems to be programmed to delete all these folders if unread when it experiences a crash--and it crashes in these cases because its connection appears to be interrupted (even though it really isn't, just slow).

This doesn't happen so often on broadband connections because KMail doesn't error out if it can't finish a download.

The consistent factor I have noticed is that something else, say the NTP client, may access the connection, and that is all that it takes to precipitate this.

Why they wrote KMail to wipe all such folders in such an occurrence is anyone's guess--perhaps it was felt that they might contain scrambled data.

This has become much more frequent since I installed KlamAV, which accesses its servers for updates just about the time I first check mail in the morning.

It is difficult to know when these connection accesses are going to occur, in most cases, other than the KlamAV, perhaps.

I have disabled the automatic KMail check, but it only needs to check for the time to set it off. Of course, one could disable the NTP client, KlamAV, and anything else one might know about, but that is a somewhat less than functional approach, and has not been foolproof (at least for this one ) so far.

Short of disabling all the automatic web accesses that things make, does anyone have any suggestions as to how to work around this, since the developers apparently don't consider it a high enough priority to address it?

Thanks to all for any suggestions,
Joe

So many things can affect what you see. The settings I mentioned may only be on IMAP accounts, or even dIMAP. As I said, I've never seen the problem and I've been using KMail for years - but I don't use KMail2, which of course is not yet officially released. I think it's highly unlikely that there is any intention of KMail deleting folders.

FWIW, I use ClamAV (not KlamAV) on my IMAP server, and of course that updates it database daily. It has never caused me any problems.

@annew:

I should mention, since I started this thread with the question involving Akonadi, that since completely disabling Nepomuk, I have experienced many fewer Akonadi crashes, and more KMail crashes, which makes me think that the two are not necessarily related, contrary to my original surmise.

When I say that it deletes the folders, I don't refer just to the appearance in the KMail interface, but to the folders in <home>/.kde/share/apps/kmail in which the imap, dimap, search, and autosave folders are all deleted, and in the ./mail folder, folders such as inbox will have only 'cur', no 'tmp' or 'new' subfolders, where some folders, such as 'drafts' and 'sent-mail' will be totally erased.

Under such conditions, KMail (and this is no more than the default version in Lucid) throws out errors if one tries to open it.

As you have never experienced such behaviour, do you use only dialup? If you use broadband, it is unlikely to occur if my observations are valid.

Please take a look at the link I provided in an earlier post in this thread, and see if you follow my argument:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83209

I shall try more shutting off of the automatic features of the various apps, but I know from experience that the clock really goes wonky if the time-server isn't accessed regularly, AV downloads can get quite large, and it would be necessary to manually perform all these actions each morning when I booted the computer. It would be nice to avoid that, if I can.

Thank you,
Joe

First thing - Kontact needs Nepomuk, as the UserBase pages tell you. Strigi can be switched off, but not Nepomuk.

You are correct in assuming that I have broadband, but unless your slow access speeds cause time-outs which in turn causes crashes, I can't see the relevance.

The bug you point to was reported in 2004 (I've been using KMail since 2002) and is linked to another report in 2006. Reading through the whole of the two reports, it seems that KMail is not deleting your folders but is not able to re-create them is something else does. One reporter says that when he created the missing folders (and presumably checked that the permissions on the folders were correct) KMail then functioned normally.

Did you follow his advice?

Thank you for your attention.

No I had not read the UserBase, presumeably you feel that I should have known about it? I would have to know of its existence to look for it, I would think. Shotgun Google searching doesn't work well with slow connections, if it works at all. Incidentally, the only way I found the link I mentioned was to google with the exact error message KMail provides, suggesting that the error is not an unknown one, so much as an unacknowledged one.

Secondly, unless I unknowingly use Kontact implicitly, I don't use it. I realize that Kontact and KMail were highly integrated earlier but this hasn't seemed to be the case in this KDE version; perhaps you can inform me? If KMail and Kontact are separate, does this mean that I should still need to run Nepomuk?

I am sorry if I suggested that the tentative explanation I offered were the only one, but I do not mean that. However, your second paragraph is precisely what I was suggesting.

In a similar vein, I have other difficulties with KPPP in which Firefox frequently fails to finish downloading a web page, simply because it assumes that the link has gone down, when it hasn't.

Downloading updates to Lucid is especially trying, as KPPP simply drops offline at odd intervals, sometimes running for a couple of hours with no issue, but especially prone to drop something like an Opera update, the server for which is always slow. This is, of course a different issue, but I'm merely pointing out that most things seem to have internal settings assuming rapid access. In fact, I don't recall if KPPP dropped in any of the instances of the KMail crash.

I'm sorry if I have irritated you in this matter to the point where you need to cite my own references as a suggestion of my own failures to take obvious steps, but at least part of the answer to your question about the link referenced was mentioned in my previous posts--to wit, that I had recreated these subfolders, and it happens again. Perhaps I need to re-read the post, but I believe there was an inference inherent in a 'bug report' that this was not actually a 'fix' for the problem. As I recall, the last I saw the status, it was 'triaged', not fixed or patched.

As it happens, I had discovered that aspect of the problem by simply following the error messages that occur. It is not a matter of permissions, but a matter of deletion of an integral part of the KMail folder structure.

Incidentally, KPPP dropped offline in just the time I have been writing this. This is not unusual for this setup--no reason given--just happens. I have compared the configuration file, line by line with the one on the older Lucid installation on this machine (which did not suffer this so badly) and found no differences.

My ISP recently switched to a new server source in Spokane (I am in Seattle) and this may have some role in this.

My main point in all of this is that I need some place to look for an answer to this which I have not explored. So far as I can tell, you tell me that I should put up with Nepomuk, as well as Akonadi (which has not been troublesome since I disabled Nepomuk) running in order to prevent KMail crashes. This is a problem for me, bogging down an 8-year old machine. I can see how a running Nepomuk *could* cause this problem with these folders, in the fashion suggested by anda_skoa earlier in this thread, but it still occurs if disabled--it's just that akonadi acts better.

Thank you for taking the time to look at this, and I hope that I have not offended anyone.

Joe

jhthayer wrote:No I had not read the UserBase, presumeably you feel that I should have known about it? I would have to know of its existence to look for it, I would think. Shotgun Google searching doesn't work well with slow connections, if it works at all.

UserBase is often mentioned on the forum, so I did assume that you would have seen it. You can use the link in my sig to get to it, then search.

Incidentally, the only way I found the link I mentioned was to google with the exact error message KMail provides, suggesting that the error is not an unknown one, so much as an unacknowledged one.

Not so. Mailing lists, including bug reports are publicly archived, and they are indexed by the search engine spiders. Not unknown, yes, but you can't take it that that means it is unacknowledged. If it is not commonly seen it is often difficult for the developers to get sufficient information to follow it up. However, it is unlikely that any further bug-fixing will happen for KMail 1, as KMail 2 is due out very soon.

Secondly, unless I unknowingly use Kontact implicitly, I don't use it. I realize that Kontact and KMail were highly integrated earlier but this hasn't seemed to be the case in this KDE version; perhaps you can inform me? If KMail and Kontact are separate, does this mean that I should still need to run Nepomuk?

You can think of Kontact as a wrapper, over applications that can run stand-alone. They are closely integrated, and yes, for all recent versions Nepomuk is essential. It is not resource-heavy and shouldn't cause you any problems. Strigi is a different matter, and you may well find it helpful to disable it.

I'm sorry if I have irritated you in this matter to the point where you need to cite my own references as a suggestion of my own failures to take obvious steps, but at least part of the answer to your question about the link referenced was mentioned in my previous posts--to wit, that I had recreated these subfolders, and it happens again. Perhaps I need to re-read the post, but I believe there was an inference inherent in a 'bug report' that this was not actually a 'fix' for the problem. As I recall, the last I saw the status, it was 'triaged', not fixed or patched.

I wasn't irritated, but it 's sometime hard to know just how far the user has gone in trying suggestions.

As it happens, I had discovered that aspect of the problem by simply following the error messages that occur. It is not a matter of permissions, but a matter of deletion of an integral part of the KMail folder structure.

No-one disputes that, but as I remember the developer said that it is not broken by Kontact,but that Kontact ought to handle the recovery better than it actually does.

My ISP recently switched to a new server source in Spokane (I am in Seattle) and this may have some role in this.

Possible but unlikely, I think.

My main point in all of this is that I need some place to look for an answer to this which I have not explored. So far as I can tell, you tell me that I should put up with Nepomuk, as well as Akonadi (which has not been troublesome since I disabled Nepomuk) running in order to prevent KMail crashes. This is a problem for me, bogging down an 8-year old machine. I can see how a running Nepomuk *could* cause this problem with these folders, in the fashion suggested by anda_skoa earlier in this thread, but it still occurs if disabled--it's just that akonadi acts better.

You can't really say that it is acting better, when you say it is totally broken - that seems illogical to me

Thank you for taking the time to look at this, and I hope that I have not offended anyone.

Joe

We are not offended. I do recommend, though, that you go to Userbase, and read the pages about Akonadi, AddressBook and KMail.

Sorry, I couldn't be certain to which thing you were referring when you said that my response was illogical. If you were referring to Akonadi, I don't recall ever saying that it was totally broken. Simply that I was experiencing crashes on shutdown fairly often and that they were generally benign. That is, they caused me no trouble. Then, I simply added that, since disabling Nepomuk, I hadn't had any Akonadi crashes. Doesn't seem illogical to me.

The only connection with this I was suggesting is that the crashes were the only current aberrational behaviour I could find, and searching the system log provided no clues, so I merely postulated the possibility, thinking someone might provide insight, not that I intended insult to the programmers' efforts, nor to your advocacy.

The fact that I wasn't knowingly using Akonadi doesn't enter, as there are many parts of the system that operate without my knowing it, and in fact, it often seems to me as if KDE is trying to isolate the user from the operation of the system.

I will check out the UserBase you mentioned. I haven't enough time to do everything that one might, and that is no small part of why I make inquiries on this forum. That is time-consuming of itself, considering that one might need to consult four or five of them, let alone searching for Google hits.

Thank you once again, for your input,
Joe

For clarification - are you saying that you no longer have the problem stated in this thread's title?