[Coco] drive crash

[Richard E Crislip]

On Sat, 7 Feb 2015 05:02:35 -0500
Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
<snip>
> I am on the claws list, and it seems to me that Claws will forever
> suffer what we call infant mortality forever. IOW they add features
> that are not well coded, and its usually months before a given new
> feature Just Works(TM)
> 
> Kmail has its warts, but savvy users do not lose old mails.  I just
> has to re-install what was once a Ubu Lucid 10.04.4 LTS due to the
> main drive developing a tummy ache and going read-only.  One of the
> things I intended to do the next time I installed, was to convert
> some of my older folders, which were in mailfile format, into maildir
> format as kmail seems to be able to process that about 2x as fast as
> it can do a big mailefile.  Kmail has an import function, but its
> slow is an understatement.  So I setup a 2nd local account where it
> would treat that almost 500 megabyte mailfile as incoming mail
> because that is the forat it epects to get from my fetchmail/procmail
> driving clamav and spamassassin, and  what surives that gets put
> into /var/spool/mail named gene.  The second local account expects to
> seea mailfile in that directory named 'import', so after manually
> making the directories the maildir format uses, and setting up what I
> thought was the correct filter criteria to catch the 'incoming' and
> route it to the coco maildir structure, I ticked the mouse on check
> mail. 20 minutes ;ater I had a nearly 81,500 msgs count showing for
> the coco folder.  But my filter wasn't as good as I thought because
> we have changed the [Coco] in the subject line several times over our
> history, so I spent some time yesterday fine tuning the filters to
> catch the other 2 popular subject labels we've, then wore out the
> ctl-j keys about 3000 times to finally get 99.99% of it into the
> proper folder. Now I admit that is NOT how kmail would allow you to
> do it as it cannot make the folder structures without putting them in
> a subdir.  Most fol;ks would simply accept that and learn to live
> with it.  The only mails I lost were in fact spam that got fed to
> sa-learn spam about 2:30 this morning and then deleted out from under
> kmail, but its housekeeping will discover that in perhaps an hour and
> refresh the list view.
> 
> Yes, kmail has some warts, one of which has caused me to setup
> background processes that do not tie up the machine, off loading the
> mail fetching from your mailserver and making it a background
> process.  But ALL of those warts I am familiar with. and have writen
> bash scripts that function as background daemons that I am never
> aware are running unless they stop.  To use a furinstance, I have a
> bin directory as a subdir of /home/gene, where I put all those
> scripts, one of which is mailwatcher.  About a 40 line script, it
> loops forever, launching a inotifywait module that watches
> the /var/spool/mail/ directory, and when an incoming mail causes the
> gene file to have the mail appended to it, the append operation has
> to open and close that file.  When the file is closed, inotifywait
> dies and reports that filename back to my script, which in turn sends
> kmail a message over dbus to go get the mail named.  When thats been
> so done, it relaunches inotifywait to go back to watching that
> directory again.  
> 
> This synchonizes the incoming mail so that kmail gets it about 2 
> milliseconds after it comes in, all without me having to tell kmail
> to go get it.  The last time I asked, claws had not managed to grow a
> dbus port so you either do it manually, or set up a timer so it does
> it for you.  But that means a 5 minute wait, or whatever you set the
> timer for, for claws to tell you 'you have mail'.  This way is 10
> milliseconds after it arrives. Fetchmail itself runs as a background
> daemon, sending mailfilter out to scan whats there, and check it
> against a list of duff sources I maintain, if a hit, that mail is
> deleted off the server and all I see is a DENY line in the logs.
> Otherwise it returns a count of mails available and fetchmail then
> goes and gets them. 
> 
> Thats one heck of a pile of wheel spinning I don't have to do, so my
> duties are to tap the + key to go to the next msg, reply to it if I
> am so inclined, hitting a ctl+return to send my reply. Wash rinse &
> repeat, that is the extent of the work I actually have to do.  And
> drag-n-drop an errant spam to the spam directory where sa-learn will
> train the bayes database on it in the night.
> 
> Whats not to like?
> 
> Cheers, Gene Heskett

 I am not that sophisticated. I managed to recover a lot of what I
 thought was lost when I had an epiphany and fired up AmiKit then YAM
 and pulled in what was still on the server and what was in the
 history there. I then exported it as maildir, them imported the file
 from the flash drive I saved it to. After that I had Claws Mail
 remove the duplicates then mark all as "read". Life is now good.