[MlMt] Message not sent (yet saved in "Sent" folder)

Benny Kjær Nielsen mailinglist at freron.com
Wed Jun 18 03:32:41 EDT 2014


On 17 Jun 2014, at 22:57, Robert Anders wrote:

> A few minutes ago it crashed when composing a new message, right after 
> signing it with GPG. When i reopened MM it asked me if i wish to open 
> the autosaved draft, which i did. I finished the message (incl. 
> signing) and sent it ("Send Message").
>
> The message got saved in my "Sent" folder, alas, it never actually got 
> sent via SMTP. I checked the logs of my mailserver, there has been no 
> connection whatsoever.

This would be a really bad bug and a very high priority to fix. 
Unfortunately, I just looked through the code and I simply cannot see 
how this could happen. Are you 100% sure the message has not been sent? 
Maybe using a different SMTP server? Is it possible to ask the 
recipient?

Given a crash at the exact right moment then it's possible that a 
message can be sent twice. This is impossible to solve, but MailMate 
tries to minimize the problem. After receiving an ok (250) from the 
server, MailMate immediately touches a file on disk to “remember” 
that sending has succeeded. If MailMate then crashes before moving the 
message from Drafts to Sent Messages (and storing this change on disk) 
then MailMate still knows the message was sent when rolling back to a 
safe state during relaunch.

But the above is the opposite problem of what you are experiencing. I 
simply cannot see how MailMate could come to the conclusion that a 
message has been sent without ever connecting to an SMTP server. That 
doesn't mean I won't believe that there is a bug. It just means that a 
eureka-moment is waiting for me when figuring it out.

> That (MM crashed again, right here when i was using the cursor) is 
> bad. Any suggestions? Are those crash reports considered?

I receive all crash reports allowed to be sent by the users, but I don't 
review all of them. I typically notice the most common crash locations 
and when a user has a repeated series of crashes in a short time frame 
(a problem both annoying for the user and likely to be reproducible). 
Your crashes are not a common problem (you might be the only one having 
them) and I failed to notice that you have had them repeatedly.

> I may have to switch to another client. I really don't want to, but i 
> can't check the logs all the time.

Understandable, but I have no other reports about messages being wrongly 
handled as sent and when/if it does happen then I strongly believe it is 
related to MailMate also crashing.

Both your problems are probably best investigated by adding some debug 
output to MailMate. I'm guessing neither problem can be reproduced on 
demand, but when it happens some day in the future then we'll have some 
debug output to review. I'll contact you off list when this is ready.

Your crashes, by the way, are all related to running external commands. 
This can happen when using signing/encryption, but it can also happen 
simply when viewing a plain text message (this is where you have most 
often experienced these crashes).

-- 
Benny


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