Bug 2678 - Claws hangs when fetching from local IMAP server
Summary: Claws hangs when fetching from local IMAP server
Status: RESOLVED LATER
Alias: None
Product: Claws Mail (GTK 2)
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Folders/IMAP (show other bugs)
Version: 3.8.0
Hardware: PC Linux
: P3 normal
Assignee: users
URL:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2012-06-13 05:52 UTC by Shankar
Modified: 2012-06-13 09:10 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:


Attachments

Description Shankar 2012-06-13 05:52:38 UTC
I am using Claws-Mail 3.8.0 on a Debian Squeeze system - it's a wonderful program.  Claws is configured to load mails from a local Dovecot IMAP server on the same machine (which in turn is updated using offlineimap). I've been using this combination for four years now with hardly any hitches.  However, recently, things have begun to slow down a lot, and ten days ago Claws began to hang entirely on certain operations.  So far I have found this to be the case when:

* Trying to open certain messages - there seems to be no clear pattern
* Running "rebuild folder tree" on the IMAP account

Once it hangs Claws will not respond to anything including a TERM signal.  It has to be killed with kill -9.  

In case it may help with diagnosing the problem, I've attached the strace output that results when I start claws, set it to online mode (it always starts offline for some reason), and then try to rebuild the folder tree.

I have deleted my entire ~/.claws-mail folder and started from scratch, to no avail.
Comment 1 Shankar 2012-06-13 05:59:49 UTC
Oops, it looks like the strace output is too large to be attached.  Apologies.
Comment 2 Paul 2012-06-13 08:59:39 UTC
If this is a recent phenomenon and not related to your Claws Mail version, then it would appear that it must be in relation to something that is not Claws Mail, right?
Comment 3 Shankar 2012-06-13 09:10:36 UTC
Thank you for your prompt reply, I was about to post here.  I neglected to add that the problem has only been cropping up since I upgraded to Claws 3.8.0.  

However, in a sense you're right.  when running from the command line, every crash was accompanied with a message saying "IMAP: parse error."  Once this message appeared, the program would hang.  I managed to address this by upgrading dovecot to version 2.0, clearing out all indexes and caches, and moving out most of the old messages to a separate IMAP account.  Now it seems to be working smoothly. 

As such it seems like the bug,if there is such, is a result of Claws failing to gracefully handle IMAP errors.  I am changing the status of this to Resolved now but perhaps this can be considered in future.

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