Losing Mail in Gnus
Brett Randall
I'm having a very strange problem with my Gnus. I'm running NoGnus 0.9
with all my mail stored in nnml format, and with Gnus spooling my mail
from my Maildir, to which mail is delivered with fetchmail and a local
postfix server.
Occasionally I will see that I have received mail in one of my groups,
and I go to read it, and it isn't there. If I delve down into the
filesystem, I cannot find any sign of the e-mail in the nnml directory,
so its not like its hidden, its really not even there, even though Gnus
thought it was.
If I then open webmail to another account to which all my e-mail is
automatically forwarded (server side), I can see the e-mail that was
supposed to be in that particular group. So its not like Gnus is
randomly thinking I have new e-mail when I don't. I actually did have a
new e-mail, but when I go to view it, it wasn't there.
The ONLY thing I can think of is that maybe fetchmail/postfix is still
in the middle of delivering to my Maildir when Gnus tries to suck it in
to its backend, and for some reason the e-mail gets lost there.
Does anyone have a clue how I would debug this kind of thing? Its a
little unnerving losing e-mails and sometimes not even knowing about it!
The relevant portion of my .gnus is:
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
'(
(nnml "brett" (nnml-directory "~brett/Mail/"))
(nnml "mairix" (nnml-directory "~brett/.mairix"))
)
)
(setq mail-sources '((maildir) (maildir :path "~brett/Maildir/cur")))
(setq nnml-get-new-mail t)
(setq mail-source-delete-incoming t)
Thanks in advance
Brett.
Brett Randall
> <snip> Hey all I'm having a very strange problem with my Gnus. </snip>
In addition to my previous post, it just happened again where my
nnml+brett:Inbox showed in the Group buffer that there were 3 new
messages, but in the summary buffer, only two messages showed up. I've
looked in my fetchmail log and there's no error with it retrieving and
delivering the mail locally, and there's no errors in the postfix log
either - it says it delivered the e-mails succesfully. However in the
Messages buffer, the following is displayed:
nnml: Reading incoming mail from maildir... [2 times]
Wrote /home/brett/.mairix/Inbox/4816
nnml: Reading incoming mail (1 new)...done
Matched 82 messages
Retrieving newsgroup: nnmairix+nnmairix:mairix...
Matched 82 messages
Fetching headers for nnmairix+nnmairix:mairix...
nnmairix: Rewriting headers... done
Fetching headers for nnmairix+nnmairix:mairix...done
Generating summary...done
Mark set [2 times]
Auto-saving...done
Auto-saving...done
Sending...
Sending via mail...
Saving file /home/brett/Mail/archive/mail/2008-09...
Wrote /home/brett/Mail/archive/mail/2008-09
Sending...done
Opening nntp server on nntp.aioe.org...done
Reading active file from nntp.aioe.org via nntp...
Reading active file from brett via nnml...
Opening nnml server on brett...done
nnml: Reading incoming mail from maildir... [2 times]
Wrote /home/brett/Mail/Inbox/4817
Wrote /home/brett/Mail/Inbox/4818
nnml: Reading incoming mail (2 new)...done
You'll see that one of my e-mails (4816) was delivered to my
.mairix/Inbox folder - .mairix being my path for the mairix search
engine I use. Does anyone know why in the world some e-mails would be
getting delivered to the Mairix backend instead of my nnml backend? In
my .gnus, I simply have:
(require 'nnmairix)
There's no other mairix configuration in there. And in my .mairixrc I
have:
base=~/Mail
mformat=mh
mh=*...
database=~/.mairixdatabase
I realise this isn't Gnus-specific now that Mairix is involved, but
hopefully someone here can give me a hand. In the meanwhile, I'm going
to keep an eye on those directories for my missing e-mails. Thanks!
Brett.
David
> nnml: Reading incoming mail from maildir... [2 times]
> Wrote /home/brett/.mairix/Inbox/4816
> You'll see that one of my e-mails (4816) was delivered to my
> .mairix/Inbox folder - .mairix being my path for the mairix search
> engine I use. Does anyone know why in the world some e-mails would be
> getting delivered to the Mairix backend instead of my nnml backend? In
> my .gnus, I simply have:
>
> (require 'nnmairix)
> I realise this isn't Gnus-specific now that Mairix is involved,
Well, Gnus is putting the mail there, not Mairix, so I'd say that's a
Gnus issue.
> but hopefully someone here can give me a hand. In the meanwhile, I'm
> going to keep an eye on those directories for my missing
> e-mails. Thanks!
What splitting rules do you have? Do you maybe use
gnus-registry-split-fancy-with-parent?
-David
brettrandall
> Brett Randall <br...@hillsong.com> writes:
> > I realise this isn't Gnus-specific now that Mairix is involved,
> Well, Gnus is putting the mail there, not Mairix, so I'd say that's a
> Gnus issue.
Yeah, I realised that as I was falling asleep last night pondering the
issue :)
> What splitting rules do you have? Do you maybe use
> gnus-registry-split-fancy-with-parent?
I use nnmail-split-methods to just divide up mail based on To/From in
my folders - no fancy splitting or anything. I don't think that's
related though as the mail that I "lose" into the nnmairix backend is
no different than any other e-mail that DID get through to the proper
group. i.e. yesterday two e-mails came from the same person. One went
into the correct group, the other went into the nnmairix backend.
Doesn't seem to be any particular reason (that I can see) that that
would happen.
Thanks for your help
Brett.
David
> I use nnmail-split-methods to just divide up mail based on To/From in
> my folders - no fancy splitting or anything.
[from the original posting]
> (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
> '(
> (nnml "brett" (nnml-directory "~brett/Mail/"))
> (nnml "mairix" (nnml-directory "~brett/.mairix"))
> )
> )
>
> (setq mail-sources '((maildir) (maildir :path "~brett/Maildir/cur")))
> (setq nnml-get-new-mail t)
nnml-get-new-mail is a server variable, i.e. it should be set per
server. Try the following setup:
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
'(
(nnml "brett" (nnml-directory "~brett/Mail/") (nnml-get-new-mail t))
(nnml "mairix" (nnml-directory "~brett/.mairix") (nnml-get-new-mail nil))
)
)
and delete the line that sets nnml-get-new-mail globally.
I wonder how Gnus decides where to put new mail when both servers have
nnml-get-new-mail set to t... Maybe Gnus should issue a warning when it
encounters a setup like this...
-David
Brett Randall
> nnml-get-new-mail is a server variable, i.e. it should be set per
> server.
Thanks, I've turned it off globally, turned it on on my "brett" nnml
directory, and left it off on the "mairix" directory. nnmairix still
seems to work with it off, so I might leave it like that for the time
being and see if I lose any more mail.
Thanks for your help!
Brett.