Evolution no longer reads mail folders

[tanderso]

Anyone here use Evolution? It's been working awesome for me for months now. I love it. But, all of a sudden, the mail component failed, and now it won't start again. The Evolution GUI starts up, but it just says, "Opening folder file://...," and never actually opens any of the folders. In the terminal, I get the following error: "evolution-shell-WARNING **: Error changing interactive status of component OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_Mail_ShellComponent to TRUE -- IDLmg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0".

I tried shutting down the program, running "killev" and "oaf-slay", but it gives me the same problems after starting it up again. I even downloaded all of the newest updates using Red Carpet, and still the same problem. When I run it as root, it opens the folders fine.

Any ideas what the problem might be? Is there a limit to the size of the folders? Could I have some email that is triggering this?
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com

 

[krale]

I dont have a clue, but it seems these people on the Ximian website do..

http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution/2001-December/015644.html

Also, how I found it is by putting the error code you got into Google. If you have an error with Linux, I guarantee that others have had the same error. That's how I fix problems rapidly on linux.

 

[tanderso]

Thanks, but I already tried that. As I said, I did "killev" and "oaf-slay", and the cited directory does not exist in my installation (1.2.1). Also, it's been running for months without problems, so it can't be a permissions issue. Further, when I run Evolution as any other user, I can load the respective user's folders without problem. It's only under my own user (where I have all of my mail saved, of course) that I cannot access since this morning.

BTW, I thought about it being a disk space issue, but I have 13GB free with no quotas.

I think the error message I copied may be a somewhat generic error that occurs as a result of other bugs, which is why I found several sites with messages saying things like "oaf-slay" will work for it. In any event, my folders will still not load.

I've submitted a Bugzilla report to Ximian.
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com

 

[krale]

Then try renaming your configuration directory in {home} to something like evo_backup and re-create your mailbox. Then try to import mail, if you can do that.

It could be corrupted configs..

 

[tanderso]

Thanks krale, good thought.

I've discovered the source of the problem. The file .#mbox.ibex.index.data exceeded 2GB, and apparently linux is limited to 32-bit integers, thus the largest possible file size is 2^31-1 bytes. Deleting the offending file returned Evolution to full functionality. I think it is really poor design to allow this basically temporary file to grow to more than 20 times the size of the associated mbox file without any sort of checks.
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com