The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Month: May 2010

  • OpenOffice: Not Spell-Checking URLs

    For some reason, the default character style automagically applied to URLs uses English… which means the spellchecker doggedly attempts to make sense out of that gibberish.

    Solution (at least for OOo 3.2):

    • F11 to get the Style and Formatting dialog up
    • Click Character Styles
    • Click Hierarchical in the lower drop-down list to see ’em all
    • Right-click Internet Link, select Modify
    • Select [None] in the Language drop-down list
    • OK your way back out

    There, now, wasn’t that easy?

    Oh, yeah, you’ll want to do that to all the templates you use to create blank documents, too.

  • Kmail: Copying Directory Structures and Some Files Therein

    As part of the Kmail blank email problem, I conjured up a new, shrunken maildir structure with just the most recent 30 days of email. However, I want to keep all the same folders, even if they have no current email messages, so my filters can sort the incoming mail properly.

    The sequence of events:

    • shut down Kmail!
    • move existing email directory out of the way
    • set up a new directory
    • copy the directory structure
    • copy the most recent 30 days of email
    • delete the existing index files

    That’s straightforward, at least after you figure it out. Took me a while to get it right, but here ya go…

    cd to the directory holding the Mail folder
mv Mail Mail.base
mkdir Mail
cd Mail.base
find . -type d -print0 | cpio --null -dmpv ../Mail
find . -type f -mtime -30 -print0 | cpio --null -apdv ../Mail
cd ../Mail
find . -type f -name ".*index" -print0 | xargs -0 rm
find . -type f -name ".*index.ids" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

    Then fire up Kmail and let it rebuild all the index files.

    You ought to try that out on a dummy version of your email, as something may have gotten clobbered in the transition from my terminal to your fingertips, OK?

  • KMail: The Blank Email Problem

    Of late, Kmail has been turning email messages into complete blanks: the Subject, From, Date, and body are all completely blank. This is evidently a problem of long standing with Kmail and has something to do with fumbling the indexes that point to the emails within its maildir directory structure.

    The FAQ blandly notes:

    You have empty ‘ghost-mails’ in your inbox (or other folder)

    Symptom: For some reason, certain messages aren’t accessible in KMail. They show up in the message list window but selecting them there results in a blank message window. I can’t open them or reply to them, etc.

    Solution: This problem ist most likely due to corrupted index files, see issue ‘You are loosing mail’ above. So just follow the advice given there.

    Well, yeah, except that rebuilding the indexes more than once a day seems excessive… and the problem is, intermittently, much worse than that.

    I’m running KMail in XFCE, which introduces some complexity, but other folks with the same problem are running it in bone-stock KDE. Surprisingly the recent 4.x upheavals haven’t changed the problem in the least.

    I’ve been keeping the maildir structure on the file server, rather than my local drive, and symlinking to it from my home directory through NFS. That also doesn’t seem to change the symptoms, although putting a heavy load on either the network or the server sometimes increases the number of blank emails.

    Over the last few months I’ve tried a number of things, like tweaking NFS buffer sizes & timings, to no avail. Time to start writing this stuff down…

    With that as prologue, here’s how to recover those blank emails.

    Most important: when you see a blank email, get out of Kmail. Nothing you do within Kmail will help and many things will hurt, so just bail out.

    Fire up a terminal window and cd to the directory representing that email folder. First-level folders have the obvious name, but all the second-level folders are in hidden directories. For example, I have a top-level folder called Bulk Stuff, with one sub-folder (among many) being EMC.

    The directory structure:

    Mail/Bulk Stuff/
Mail/.Bulk Stuff.directory/EMC/

    Yeah, embedded blanks. Sue me.

    Each of those directories has three subdirectories: cur, new, and tmp.

    The problem seems to arise when a new message gets transferred from new to cur, although sometimes existing messages in cur go bad. The index entry seems to point to the wrong place; the actual mail message file is in cur, but the index points off into the bushes somewhere.

    The solution is to manually move the file from cur back to new, then rebuild the offending index. Leaving it in cur and just rebuilding the index does not always work, for reasons I do not understand.

    The easiest way to find the newest messages:

    cd "Mail/.Bulk Stuff.directory/EMC"
ll cur | tail

    This will show the most recent few entries, which will look something like this:

    -rw-r--r-- 1 ed ed 22256 2010-04-19 20:48 1271724492.2194.DbdZD:2,S
-rw-r--r-- 1 ed ed 23513 2010-04-20 13:09 1271783386.2232.jxmG6:2,S
-rw-r--r-- 1 ed ed 20901 2010-04-20 17:10 1271797805.2232.i6fP3

    The last line shows the most recent files hasn’t been read yet, which is a tipoff that something’s wrong. If you have an older message with a rotten index entry, use grep (or some such) to find it.

    Move the file back to new and delete the corresponding index files:

    mv cur/1271797805.2232.i6fP3 new
cd ..
rm ".Bulk Stuff.index*"

    Then fire up Kmail again and it’ll automagically rebuild the indexes. That’ll work fine for a while, then it’ll screw up again.

    I suspect that the problem is related to either the number of messages or the index file size for each maildir directory. I have, in round numbers, 3 GB of mail stashed away. As with anything, most of it is useless , but I occasionally need one of those messages ever so urgently.

    I set up a new maildir structure with only the last 30 days of email transactions, which should be enough to either eliminate the problem or show that Too Many Messages is just another dead end.

    More details on that tomorrow…