Cannot flush emails in the queue because one file is missing

[Mat]

Hi,

I have messages in my mu4e queue but I cannot send them, when I press f to flush, I get the following error:

funcall-interactively: Opening input file: No such file or directory, /home/mat/.mail/inrae/queue/cur/2026-07-17_18:09:19_1

This is what I have in that folder:

mat@p3-guix~ $ ls .mail/inrae/queue/cur
2025-11-28_14:53:12_1.el  2025-11-28_17:43:40_8.el   2026-04-27_11:47:40_5.el   2026-07-17_18:31:43_2:2,S
2025-11-28_14:54:45_2.el  2025-11-28_18:19:53_9.el   2026-04-27_12:02:16_6.el   2026-07-17_18:31:43_2.el
2025-11-28_14:55:51_3.el  2025-11-28_18:31:25_10.el  2026-04-27_13:42:10_7.el   2026-07-20_10:16:19_3
2025-11-28_15:03:02_4.el  2026-04-22_23:33:03_1.el   2026-04-27_13:57:10_8.el   2026-07-20_10:16:19_3.el
2025-11-28_15:09:20_5.el  2026-04-22_23:35:28_2.el   2026-04-27_18:28:46_2.el   2026-07-20_11:59:28_4
2025-11-28_15:21:33_6.el  2026-04-22_23:43:22_3.el   2026-07-17_18:09:19_1:2,S  2026-07-20_11:59:28_4.el
2025-11-28_17:02:18_7.el  2026-04-27_11:21:04_4.el   2026-07-17_18:09:19_1.el   index

The error is a bit cryptic to me, since the file is there. I assume this is a mu index issue, but I did a clean indexation recently so I don't really understand how this would be borked.

Can anyone help me with this? Some of those emails were moderately urgent and I just figured a bit late that they were stuck in my queue. I can find them there and resend them, but I would prefer to just fix the bug.

[Mat]

The error is a bit cryptic to me, since the file is there. I assume this is a mu index issue, but I did a clean indexation recently so I don't really understand how this would be borked.

In fact the file in question is not there, since mu/mu4e is looking for the filename without the .el extension, but that means that the reference to this file is somewhere in the mu index, and I can't understand why or how to solve this, since I'm already on a fresh index. 

[Carlo Zancanaro]

Hi Mat,

I just did some quick playing around with queuing, and I expect
there is a line in ~/.mail/inrae/queue/cur/index which lists your
problem file. I assume you can delete that line to skip the email
that's causing issues.

Looking at the file names you've provided, I expect the added :2,S
suffix is causing things to break. I think mu4e adds this, but I
don't know the details.

Carlo

[Mat]

Thanks a lot for the reply Carlo.

My issue is index contains 4 lines, while I do have 4 queued emails, so I'm thinking those four lines are the actual emails to be flushed. I'm not sure what is the :2,S thing but I would assume it is emails that have been sent already, or improperly moved to that subfolder?

If I remove a line from the index file, I'm afraid the next 3 are going to cause the same issue, and if I remove all three, there will be no emails to flush anymore.

I tried to make a backup of the index file into a different named, then just ran "touch index" to create an empty one with the same permissions, and the same error appears, even after killing the mu process and restarting it.

[Alexis]

Carlo Zancanaro <carloza...@gmail.com> writes:

> Looking at the file names you've provided, I expect the added
> :2,S
> suffix is causing things to break. I think mu4e adds this, but I
> don't
> know the details.

Those sort of suffixes are part of the maildir format:

https://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html

More specifically, as described at that link, "2,S" indicates an email has been 'seen':

"Flag 'S' (seen): the user has viewed this message"


Alexis.

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

mu4e uses smtpmail for this, so what it precisely expects in those file
is internal to that. I don't know if it's documented beyond what you can
find by reading smtpmail.el (part of emacs).

What seems to have happened is that you somehow accessed the queue dir
as if it is a maildir. Please see the "Queuing mail" section in the mu4e
documentation on how to avoid that; basically, drop a .noindex in that
directory.

For recovery, best move (using "mv") the files that have a :2,S to your
draft directory, but change the 'S' into a 'D' (for draft), and then use
mu4e to send your drafts.

To avoid accidentally switching to queued mode, you can remove the
key-binding from mu4e-main-mode-map or set smtpmail-queue-dir to nil.

Kind regards,
Dirk.

--
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema Helsinki, Finland
e:dj...@djcbsoftware.nl w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
gpg: 6987 9CED 1745 9375 0F14 DA98 11DD FEA9 DCC4 A036

[Mat]

Thanks a lot for the explanation and help!