pmMail 3.24 serious problems

[Martin Vieregg]

I have got serious problems with pmMail 3.24. It is nervy that it always tries to reindex folders when opening a folder, and the processor load is heavy when re-indexing a folder by command (I have SD and Ryzen processor). But my main problem is now, that in the SENT Folder, pmMail 3.24 omits the "From:" line in the mail. That would not be a problem, because in my SENT folder, all stored mails are written by me. But when reindexing the folder, I get the error message:

Code: [Select]

Folder Re-Index - <Sent Mail>
Content has no FROM address: [VIEREG0.ACT\SENT.FLD\qtao1500.msg]
Content has no FROM address: [VIEREG0.ACT\SENT.FLD\qtaozp00.msg]
Content has no FROM address: [VIEREG0.ACT\SENT.FLD\qtat8g00.msg]
Content has no FROM address: [VIEREG0.ACT\SENT.FLD\qtcf3y00.msg]
(and so on)

So all sent mails which I have sent with pmMail 3.24 are vanishing when reindexing the SENT folder. That's not funny !

Can someone send this bug report to the autor or send me the address or buglist page where I can send this description? Thank you.

[David Graser]

Have you tried the latest version on Hobbes?

https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/apps/internet/mail/reader/pmm/pmmail-3-25-00-1993.wpi

[Doug Bissett]

The missing FROM: thing is from some years ago. That is information only, and isn't what is causing your problem.

David's suggestion to update is probably a good one (see http://pmmail.os2voice.org/index.php?title=PMMail_for_OS/2, for more information), Be sure to do the required YUM updates. Do that before installing, if you can, but I suspect that there is some other problem that is causing the re-index problem.

You can get to the PMMail Mantis Bug Tracker using Help-> VOICE on the web-> PMMail technical Support. Log in or sign up for a new account. If you open an incident, be sure to include verbose logs, and a detailed description of the problem, along with any other information that may prove to be useful,

Be assured, that your messages are probably safe, From what you say, something is causing a re-index to fail, which is simply the generated message index. PMMail 3.25.00.1993 (32809) - Jul 25 2021 16:20:17 +0000 (GMT) may (or may not) fix the problem, but it would be the first thing to try. You may want to BACK UP, so you can get back to where you started. Often, simply doing Re-Index again will get past whatever it doesn't like (especially if you haven't done a Re-Index recently, which would seem to be the case since you don't know about the FROM: thing), I have also seen stray, non message, files get put into the folders, and that can cause problems.

Did you, by any chance, install the libc, and libcx, updates from the netlabs-exp repository? I haven't seen any problems with that, but they are new, and probably not well tested.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hi Martin,

Given that this is happening in your SENT folder, I am curious: how many messages are in there?

I ask because I have been using PMMail since literally 'Day-1' of my OS/2 usage (roughly, LOL). Over the years I have accumulated thousands of sent emails. The re-index function would routinely die during every attempt to re-index that massive single folder (in excess of 20K+ emails).

What I did was to create sub-folders within the 'Sent Mail' folder itself. I tossed each 5 yrs worth of emails into each sub-folder. This allows me to search across all (b/c PMMail offers the function to search in sub-folders) while enabling the re-index functionality to handle each folder. Most of these are between 3-5K of emails each now.

Worth a try? Could be an easy fix if that's what you're running up against...

[Doug Bissett]

Given that this is happening in your SENT folder, I am curious: how many messages are in there?

Good thought. I theory, 20K messages should not be a problem. In practice, it is best to keep folders to no more than about 5K messages (no more than 1K is better). Making sub folders of the Sent folder, maintains the sent folder characteristics, and it can make it a LOT easier to find things. The actual problem is not the number of messages, but trying to display that many messages in the OS/2 container. That really needs to be changed to a "sliding window", of the actual message content, rather than trying to show them all in one window. Unfortunately, VOICE lost the main programmer, a couple of years ago. We have another person who does it part time, but he is far too busy, on more important projects, to do anything other than fix problems that impact normal operation.

One of the "problems", that I have seen, is that folders that are used while online (INBOX, SENT, OUTBOX, and any place where messages would be filtered to), can become large enough that they can actually cause a server timeout, while waiting for PMMail to process messages (XML processing is not very fast, apparently by design). That will, of course, be much worse when PMMail needs to re-index folders (that can happen if the indexing becomes corrupted somehow - like a failed re-index).

Personally, I purge most of my e-mail, after 12 months, after moving anything that should be kept to folders that are never used while online. That seems to be working well.

[Neil Waldhauer]

The home page for PMMail/2 is here: http://pmmail.os2voice.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

When you go there, a button on the left side of the page takes you to the bug-tracker.

[Martin Vieregg]

I have got 1350 mails in the SENT folder. If the messages are older than 2 years, I move them to subfolders 2018, 2019...

Meanwhile, I have updated to pmMail 3.25 and yes, it seems to be better than 3.24. But the vanishing E-Mails do not appear again.

Now I have managed a simple workaround to add the "from:" line to all affected files.

To make sure that you do not corrupt your msg files, make a backup copy of sent.fld without subdirectories.

1. Download my DO commandline tool http://www.hypermake.de/archive/do-os2.zip
2. Make the sent.fld current
3. create a batch file addfrom.cmd with the content:

Code: [Select]

copy %1 temp.txt
copy from.txt+temp.txt %1
3. create a text file from.txt with the missing "from:" line (do not forget the final Return)

4. run:

Code: [Select]

do searchlistno . *.msg From: >repair_from.cmd
You will get a list of files which are affected (do not contain "From:").

5. Edit the new batch file and make a search/replacement so you will get:

Code: [Select]

call addfrom.cmd quapom00.msg
call addfrom.cmd quawhg00.msg
call addfrom.cmd quaxg100.msg
call addfrom.cmd qubmkd00.msg
6. Run the batch file.

The file dates will update to the current date, but the correct dates are still shown in pmMail.