Moved mail messages often reappear

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Level 2

254 points

Moved mail messages often reappear

This is a problem that has been plaguing me for the last several months: when I move a message from my Inbox or Sent Mail to my Done folder on our work email server, the message reappears in its original location a few minutes later. I can delete it from the Inbox/Sent Mail, and will often return again. Sometimes I can delete the message 3 times before it stays deleted. I cannot tell where the source of the problem is.

I'm using Mail 4.3 on Mac OS X 10.6.4. The account is an IMAP account on a dovecot-1.0.7-7.el5 server, which is redhat's port of dovecot v1.07.

One oddity is that I use MailTags [1] to add info to the header of the email which I can then use for filing the email in the work email system. When I add a tag, MailTags resaves the message to the server. It does not change the identifier of the message.

I also tend to remove attachments after I've filed them, so I don't have extra copies of data files bloating my mailboxes. This also causes a resave of the message to the server.

I ran some experiments with different numbers of attachments, sources etc, and could not find the pattern.

Does anyone know how I can figure out where the problem is? It is completely crippling my email at work, because it is typically tripling the time it takes me to mark a message as done.

I've looked through the discussions, but nothing suggested there has done a lick of good.

Thanks for any help,

Bill

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4), Mail 4.3, MailTags

Posted on Aug 31, 2010 2:38 PM

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Answer 1

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Ernie Stamper

Level 8

37,591 points

Aug 31, 2010 4:58 PM in response to Bill Rising

Do you have the latest version of MailTags? I note, but have not ever used at all, that version 2.5 is cited as adding compatibility for Mail 4.3 in 10.6.4.

The behavior you describe would be consistent with errors in the indexing of mailboxes, and it may be possible that MailTags is not keeping track of the messages when moved to the Done folder you describe, via communication with the index.

Ernie

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Answer 2

Bill Rising Author

Level 2

254 points

Sep 1, 2010 6:02 AM in response to Ernie Stamper

Ernie Stamper wrote:
Do you have the latest version of MailTags? I note, but have not ever used at all, that version 2.5 is cited as adding compatibility for Mail 4.3 in 10.6.4.

Yes, it's always been kept up-to-date.

The behavior you describe would be consistent with errors in the indexing of mailboxes, and it may be possible that MailTags is not keeping track of the messages when moved to the Done folder you describe, via communication with the index.

MailTags shouldn't have any influence when it comes to moving the messages to the Done folder, because they get dragged there by hand. It could have some influence when resaving the messages after adding the tags, but I would then expect to see duplicates when I add or change the tags, also.

I'll run some experiments and report back...

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Answer 3

Bill Rising Author

Level 2

254 points

Sep 1, 2010 10:10 AM in response to Bill Rising

Well, I ran a bunch of experiments and found that the one and only cause for duplication was a change in a MailTags. My guess is that there is a problem with dovecot indexing messages based on checksums of the headers, and since the headers are different between the old message and the moved message, it thinks the original was never moved.

FWIW: I tried rebuilding the mailbox on my end, and tried putting things in new mailboxes which had no indexes...and got the same duplication problems.

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