~rjarry/aerc#261: Emails in Inbox not display after moving emails here from another account

Hi aerc team,

This is my setup: maildir++ with two accounts: "private" and "work".

After moving an email from private to work with :mv -a work Inbox, the Inbox is (frequently, but not always) display as empty when launching aerc, although the new and other emails are located in this folder.

I think this must has to do with the new -a flag, because I never noticed anything like it before.

Some more observations:

Switching folders or account tabs never solves this problem. Aerc has to be relaunched (multiple times).

When I move all emails from Inbox to another folder, they are reliably displayed there. When I move them back to Inbox, the described problem persists.

So, I bravely moved some emails from work to private using :mv -a private Inbox. Now the Inbox folder for private account is also affected.

Before move -a was possible I sometimes moved emails using the command line. This never caused a problem.

This is a rather severe problem for me, because I try to keep my Inbox folders empty and I'm usually not surprised about an empty folder.

Thank you!

Status: REPORTED
Submitter: ~neff
Assigned to: No-one
Submitted: 5 months ago
Updated: 5 months ago
Labels: bug maildir

~neff 5 months ago

Please let me add one more detail: With regard to this issue both accounts are totally unrelated.

When there are emails in both inboxes and aerc is launched, messages are displayed either in none, both or only one of the accounts.

So, to reliably display emails in the work account's inbox I have to launch aerc with aerc -a work about 3 to 6 times.

~neff 5 months ago*

Had finally time to investigate this issue and found out the reason.

The problem is related to maildir++ where Inbox emails are located in
./cur
./new
./tmp
, whereas emails in other folders are located in e.g.
./.Archive/cur
...
Problem 1:

When using mv -a ACCOUNT Inbox, aerc incorrectly creates a new .Inbox directory (with three empty subdirs: cur, new, tmp).

When you then launch aerc it somehow toggles between ./cur and ./.Inbox/cur.

Problem 2 -- caused by problem 1:

When using mv Inbox e.g. from within the Archive folder, the relevant message is moved to ./.Inbox/cur instead of ./cur, because aerc probably assumes the default maildir format. This may be the correct behavior in case aerc does not check for maildir++ in any other way.

When the obsolete ./.Inbox folder is deleted, mv Inbox correctly moves emails to ./cur.

~rjarry/aerc#261:

Emails in Inbox not display after moving emails here from another account

~neff 5 months ago

~neff 5 months ago*

~ferdinandyb added maildir 5 months ago

~ferdinandyb added bug 5 months ago