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dholland

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  • "dholland" started this thread

Posts: 8

Location: USA

Occupation: SW eng

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1

Tuesday, March 6th 2007, 3:38pm

Kmail crashes during fetch

I am running Kmail 1.8.2 (KDE 3.4.2 Level b SUSE 10.0). I have three accounts configured in Kmail, and whenever I try to fetch mail from my server from one of those accounts a get a dialog box with the heading "Invalid Response From Server", and the error "Unable to complete LIST operation." At that point I click "OK". Then when I exit Kmail I get a crash (SIGSEV).

I found a bug report from 2005 (99589) with status unconfirmed that is an exact duplicate of my issue, and that bug was a duplicate of 3 others that were unconfirmed. I updated that bug with new information 2/28/07.

To investigate I tried fetching from that account's server using a different mail client which works. I also snooped the packets exchanged between my laptop and the pop3 server, and the packets were valid.

I tried to upgrade my version of KDE to 3.5.6 to see if I could reproduce it there, but I ran into several problems with the upgrade (see thread from me in Installation forum), so I uninstalled kdepim, rebooted and reinstalled from my distibution disks. The problem is persistent.

I believe the crash is due to an uninitialized variable in the error path of the dialog result because the original bug identified problems when a packet was malformed (not true in my case).

Since I have deleted and reinstalled the application, I believe the root of my problem is a cache kept on my machine. I tried deleting and recreating that particular account, but the problem still persists.

My question is what files might I try clearing or rebuilding to fix that account? As I mentioned the "List.." error only happens on one account, and the others work fine, so the files must be specific to that account. I suspect it is one of the files in my .kde/socket-<host> directory. Does anyone know how those files are established and what they do?

dholland

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2

Wednesday, March 7th 2007, 4:37am

Where is the configuration error

Well I selectively cleaned out the files in .kde/socket-<host> directory, and that doesn't clear up the problem. I've looked into the .kderc file, but there is no obvious error there either. I have also verified that if I kill the kmail process after the "List..." error (which never completes) there is no seg fault (duh!) I guess I'll go back to the sniffer and see if I can find any difference in the protocol exchanges between the working accounts and the faulted one.

David

3

Saturday, April 21st 2007, 2:23pm

KMail 1.8 "Unable to complete LIST operation"

I want to confirm the error

I have two different users accessing the same mail server via Kmail, one user can recieve mail normaly, the other one gets exactly the same behaviour you discribe.

I already renamed all files obviously related to Kmail and Kontact (kmailrc, apps/kmail/, ...) and recreated my Mail settings from scratch, but it did not help.

Does Kmail (or one of the KIOslaves) have other files which are used to store something in?

I hope someone can help, if you know the answer, please notify me by eMail (I will use thunderbird for now ;) ).

4

Saturday, April 21st 2007, 8:59pm

RE: KMail 1.8 "Unable to complete LIST operation"

I found something which might or might not be the reason for this behaviour, anyway here it goes:

My distribution was Mandriva 10.2 and I installed a Debian 4.0 "etch" on the same computer. After copying my Mandriva ~/.Mail folder to the newly created user account home (different hard disk), the Debian Kmail showed exactly the same error as the Mandriva.

I then gave up and installed Icedove, which worked flawlessly. After that I gave Kmail a last chance, and suddenly it worked, but it no longer showed any Mails from my ~/.Mail folder.
I then imported the emails from the ~/.Mail folder and found out that within the ~/.Mail folder there was a link (named .Mail), which was pointing to ~/.Mail . So I had a circular reference in the filesystem, which just might have been the reason that Kmail did not work.

Maybe it had something to do with Iceweasel downloading all mails from the mailserver and deleting them on the server. Maybe there was some sort of "denial of service" - mail in the inbox.

In case it was the circular reference link, please check how such a link could possibly be created by any portion of KDE.

dholland

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5

Monday, April 23rd 2007, 3:34pm

bad link

Gustl,

Thanks for the suggestion. I went back and tried to find something like you described, but could not (both find -follow and grep -r have no problems). I suspect there may be multiple root causes to this same symptom. I did run Kmail again, and noticed that the kio_pop3 process seems to be the one that generates the "List Error" dialog. Also, when the List error comes up it looks like the thread is hung on a read_nocancel which is consistent because if I try to cancel the operation it doesn't really change state. Without looking into it more deeply it seems like it could be a race condition that is exposed by a cached value. Your relocation of the directory may have removed that, or it may have been the circular link.

I have since changed to evolution for my mail application because I didn't have the time to spend on KDE to really debug it and because of the 3.5 build issues I had. I may pick up 3.5 with my next distro (looking at etch). If so I'll rebuild it then so that if the error comes up again (and given that it's been around in one form or another for several years that seems like a good bet) I'll have source to trace.

David

6

Monday, April 23rd 2007, 5:02pm

I found that it was not the bad link ;)

But so it happens when evasive bugs are looked for 8)

The LIST error appears whenever I get japanese spam which is encoded in the shift-JIS encoding (but the Mail itself says it is encoded in "iso-2022-jp").

The bad thing is, I cannot send myself the message in a way which causes Kmail to run into the error. I have saved the mails from Thunderbird (Icedove, in fact :P ) to .eml files and will attach it (Spam.eml , Spam2.eml, Spam3.eml).
gustl has attached the following files:
  • Spam.eml (1.02 kB - 81 times downloaded - latest: Jul 11th 2008, 2:07pm)
  • Spam2.eml (2.11 kB - 77 times downloaded - latest: Jun 28th 2008, 12:14am)
  • Spam3.eml (3.44 kB - 75 times downloaded - latest: Jul 20th 2008, 6:26pm)

euneuber

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7

Wednesday, May 30th 2007, 2:51pm

Just a workaround which hurts :-(

Your investigation was very helpful! Thanks a lot!

I now use Thunderbird with a rule to delete Mail with

CONTENT-Type contains iso-2022-jp

directly from the server.
... in case KMail hangs again ;-)

:Eugen