[MlMt] Involuntary database rebuilding = bug

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 20 Feb 2018, at 7:13, Roger Bohn wrote:

> HOWEVER, when I select “Do nothing,” I get stuck in an infinite 
> loop. When MM restarts, I get the same choices. There is NO WAY TO 
> AVOID REBUILDING. This is clearly a bug. Why give a choice if it 
> cannot be used?

The option is to “do nothing after relaunching MailMate”. There is 
no option to just keep on running MailMate. When MailMate is in an 
inconsistent state then that would be very risky. It could result, e.g., 
in the loss of emails. At the very least, it would likely quickly result 
in a crash.

> I appreciate MM trying to maintain the integrity of my data, but this 
> is a case where I am willing to lose a few messages in order to avoid 
> the risk of a rebuilding.

Unfortunately there is no way for MailMate to know if the problem 
involves a few messages or all of your messages.

> What should I do if this happens again?

I'm afraid you'll have to do the rebuild.

But please note what the error message is and what happened before 
MailMate got into this state. Anything which might be relevant. I'm very 
rarely contacted when users do a rebuild and I know almost nothing about 
what can trigger it. I only know that restoring MailMate from a backup 
can result in a corrupted database, because MailMate cannot control in 
what order the files were copied to the backup.

“Regular” crashes should, at least in theory, not result in a 
corrupted database, because in that case MailMate knows how to roll back 
to the most recent consistent state on disk.

(I haven't had a database corruption event myself for quite a few 
years.)

-- 
Benny