'notmuch new' trying to read non-existing files

'notmuch new' trying to read non-existing files

[Perttu Luukko]

Hi,

I decided to give notmuch a spin and installed version 0.18.1 on my mail
provider's shell server. The layout offered by my mail provider's
Dovecot is such that INBOX is stored in Maildir format at ~/Maildir and
other folders are stored as subfolders of ~/Maildir, filename of each
directory beginning with a period. In addition, ~/Maildir contains files
'dovecot-uidlist' and dovecot-uidvalidity', and each subdirectory
contains an empty file 'maildirfolder' in addition to the usual cur, new
and tmp. I don't know if this is an unusual layout or not.

When I run 'notmuch new' I get:

	Found 9903 total files (that's not much mail).
	Error reading file /home/users/(username)/Maildir/.act/.act: No such file
	or directory
	Processed 1 file in almost no time.
	Added 1 new message to the database.
	Note: A fatal error was encountered: Something went wrong trying to read
	or write a file

The subdirectory .act is really the first (alphabetically) subdirectory
of ~/Maildir, but .act/.act does not exist and I don't know why notmuch
tries to read it. In a following run the .act subdirectory gets replaced
by .Drafts, but the error is the same. So for some reason 'notmuch new'
tries to read for each subdirectory a deeper subdirectory which does not
exist. Only emails in the top-level INBOX folder are added to the
database. The same collection of email offlineimap'd to my local
computer and with a more plain layout (each folder as a subdirectory of
~/mail, no dots) is read without problems.

What could be going wrong here? Is this a layout that should be indexed
by notmuch?

Please note that I'm not subscribed to this mailing list -- I'm not
using notmuch yet so I can't handle the volume :)

-- 
Perttu Luukko

Re: 'notmuch new' trying to read non-existing files

[David Bremner]

Perttu Luukko <perttu.luukko@iki.fi> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I decided to give notmuch a spin and installed version 0.18.1 on my mail
> provider's shell server. The layout offered by my mail provider's
> Dovecot is such that INBOX is stored in Maildir format at ~/Maildir and
> other folders are stored as subfolders of ~/Maildir, filename of each
> directory beginning with a period. In addition, ~/Maildir contains files
> 'dovecot-uidlist' and dovecot-uidvalidity', and each subdirectory
> contains an empty file 'maildirfolder' in addition to the usual cur, new
> and tmp. I don't know if this is an unusual layout or not.

It doesn't seem that unusual to me. At least if all the folders are in
the top level of Maildir, this is the semi-standard Maildir++ format.

>
> When I run 'notmuch new' I get:
>
> 	Found 9903 total files (that's not much mail).
> 	Error reading file /home/users/(username)/Maildir/.act/.act: No such file
> 	or directory

I have a Maildir++ setup myself and I don't have this problem.  I ran a
fresh notmuch new on Debian Stable with 0.18.1 with an ext3 file
system. FWIW on that machine I have gmime 2.6.10 and xapian 1.2.12

I'm grasping at straws a bit, but do you by chance have some fancy
symlinks in your Maildir?  

d

Re: 'notmuch new' trying to read non-existing files

[Perttu Luukko]

On 2014-08-26 13:01:22, David Bremner wrote:
> Perttu Luukko <perttu.luukko@iki.fi> writes:
> > When I run 'notmuch new' I get:
> >
> > 	Found 9903 total files (that's not much mail).
> > 	Error reading file /home/users/(username)/Maildir/.act/.act: No such file
> > 	or directory
> 
> I'm grasping at straws a bit, but do you by chance have some fancy
> symlinks in your Maildir?  

Well this is embarrassing, but this was indeed the case. I had cleaned
the Maildir from what I thought were leftover symlinks from some time
long ago. Actually, I had a script that creates, with symlinks, a copy
of my mailbox without the dots in the directory names for use with Mutt.
I had left out parameter -T from 'ln' so my script also created weird
symlinks at ~/Maildir, and thus resurrected the links I thought I
cleaned up. And the links were indeed the problem.

Everything is working now. Sorry and thanks!

-- 
Perttu

Re: 'notmuch new' trying to read non-existing files

[Andrei POPESCU]

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On Mi, 27 aug 14, 07:29:38, Perttu Luukko wrote:
> 
> Well this is embarrassing, but this was indeed the case. I had cleaned
> the Maildir from what I thought were leftover symlinks from some time
> long ago. Actually, I had a script that creates, with symlinks, a copy
> of my mailbox without the dots in the directory names for use with Mutt.

Just for your info, Mutt works just fine with Maildir++, without any 
special configuration.

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)
http://nuvreauspam.ro/gpg-transition.txt

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