Broobles Forum

[gillius]

First off, thanks for the tool. I am a Thunderbird user but as far as I can tell, you can only delete attachments for a single message at a time so I tried IMAPSize.

I only wanted to use the tool one time so I disabled caching immediately in the options and proceeded to connect for the first time. When I selected my mails and said to delete attachments a window came up saying that all of the mails (giving their UIDs) where not found. I enabled caching and it worked fine.

Originally I was going to post about the sort arrows on the columns. I noticed that they were backwards from Outlook, which confused me, but then when I looked at Thunderbird I noticed they agreed with IMAPSize, so apparently there is no consistent standard, although for some reason I intuitively expected it to work opposite. I wouldn't change it now, though, because there are other programs that work the same way and now IMAPSize users are used to the current way. Ultimately it doesn't matter as sorting is fast enough you can always flip it if you want it the other way, and it is immediately apparent which way it sorted.

In general the program seems that it is well designed, and I found it nice that activities can be queued and asynchronous. I hear there is an error reporting tool that gives a stack trace -- you wrote this in C/C++? I wonder what you used to get an error reporting tool with email and stacktrace in C++?
_________________
Jason

Gillius's Programming
http://www.gillius.org/

[Ivan]

Hi Jason,

Attachment deletion should be working fine with or without caching. It's one of the most used features of IMAPSize so it's well tested accross servers. If you have time I would appreciate if you could try to reproduce the problem and send me the exact error message you're getting so I can check it out.

IMAPSize is written in Delphi 6. It uses madExcept for error reporting. If you are interested, there is a Credits tab in the About box which lists 3rd party libraries that are used in IMAPSize.

Cheers,
Ivan

[Guest]

Ah, I actually (believe or or not) already found the credits tag, but I didn't associate "Exception Handling" with the error reporting. The only lib I clicked on from there was Synapse and said it was for C++ and Delphi and I suppose I just guessed it was C++.

I might try to reproduce it again later, because I have used it to delete my attachments already!

Another feature I might wonder if IMAPSize can do is manage local mbox folders as would be found on a UNIX system or the profile directory of Thunderbird. I have some years of archived mail I might decide to try to use IMAPSize with, but currently I can only see it working that way if I uploaded all of my mails to a server then ran IMAPSize on it.

[gillius]

I have again reproduced the error, but I am still trying to determine what caused it. Here is what I did, exactly as best as I can tell. I was trying to rerun what reproduced it but failed a few times.

The server runs Linux, I believe it is Red Hat. I think the mail server is exim, but I can't remember if that is for SMTP alone. The server is hosted, so the box itself is not under my control.

Unzip new copy of IMAPSize 030
Run
Create new account, do not save pw
Go to options, and disable cache
Check check sizes to load initial acct view
right click "Deleted Items" and pick Get Message List
while folder is loading I click on Sent Items and press Enter
Deleted Items finishes first (that's not what I wanted to try).
I select every message in Sent Items and pick to delete attachments
There is only one mail in there with attachment, as a test item (since I deleted all of them earlier before this test, unfortunately)
IMAPSize works.
ctrl-f2 to unmark deleted item, and f2 on created item. So here I am reversing the IMAPSize changes to not modify my box essentially
expunge Sent Items to delete the mail just created by IMAPSize
Click on Deleted Items and press enter
While Deleted Items is loading I click on INBOX and press enter
INBOX loads almost instantly while Deleted Items loads in background
wait for DI folder to finish loading
screen contents replaced with DI folder contents
select all mails in folder (635)
Select delete attachments
only one mail exists now with attachments, for testing
I get error messages! (see below)
I click on Sent Items to check UIDs. Interestingly the screen for the mails there when I press enter comes up immediately, even though there is no cache! But the loading is occuring in the background even though all data is already loaded.

I looked at the error list and the UIDs on the folders and it appears that the UIDs in the errors match the UIDs of the Deleted Items folder.

Now I loaded INBOX folder view, because I realized that maybe I should be looking at INBOX.

For example, UID 725 does actually exist in the DI folder.

Now I am scanning the error log list for messages it thinks does exist.

UID 577 DOES exist in INBOX. UID 466 DOES exist in inbox. No other messages are found. Message 841 exists in INBOX but not in DI.

Hypothesis: when INBOX was viewed while DI was loading, IMAP directory was changed to INBOX from DI. Then DI was loaded and interface was displaying DI data. But when it went to try to modify messages in the DI folder it was actually in the INBOX folder, which is why it found 466 and 577 but not any other messages. 466 and 577 in the INBOX do not have attachments.

I feel pretty certain that I have completely found the error now...

Error messages like:
Cannot find local message (UID=725). Skipping
Cannot find local message (UID=723). Skipping
Cannot find local message (UID=724). Skipping
Cannot find local message (UID=634). Skipping
Cannot find local message (UID=640). Skipping
Cannot find local message (UID=632). Skipping
Cannot find local message (UID=631). Skipping
Cannot find local message (UID=627). Skipping
Cannot find local message (UID=630). Skipping

With some:
Message (UID=577) does not contain attachments. Skipping

No messages had their attachments removed
_________________
Jason

Gillius's Programming
http://www.gillius.org/

[Ivan]

Regarding mbox files, IMAPSize only provides a tool for mbox conversion to eml files (one file per message) and also supports mbox uploads to IMAP servers. It doesn't provide you with tools to edit mbox files.

However, you can set up a local IMAP server, upload your mbox archives to it with IMAPSize and use the email client of your choice to access, manage and search the archive. If you are interested in this approach, you can check this list of email servers.

Personally, I like the Hamster IMAP server because I can install it on a CD/DVD together with my mail, so I have instant access to my archives with my favourite IMAP client.

[gillius]

OK so summary is that it fails if you load a folder that starts AND finishes loading while loading another folder, and you try to delete attachments from the folder who started loading first but finished loading last. I don't know if caching does anything.
_________________
Jason

Gillius's Programming
http://www.gillius.org/

[Ivan]

[gillius]

Oh Hamster! I briefly checked it out. If you are right that will be amazing as I have actually considering trying to set up a server or something to allow myself remote access to the files. The other alternative is to find a "portable Thunderbird" (I know there is portable Firefox so I assume there is portable Thunderbird) and keep everything on a USB key.

I suppose maybe I could just keep everything on the real server too as I do have the space to do that... but I am a space whore I guess and like to keep the server trimmed and clean.
_________________
Jason

Gillius's Programming
http://www.gillius.org/