On Wednesday 14 April 2004 18:08, Richard wrote:
On my SuSE9.0 with KDE 3.2.1, suddenly Kmail began to die i.e., go away suddenly, without warning while reading mail. I would restart it and look at one or two emails then it would simply go away. I had not made any changes to the system in several days.
Finally, upon starting Kmail, it would come up, display the mail folders, and the list of mail but the message viewing section would be blank. Clicking on either the folders or the messages got no response. After a few seconds, 5-10 seconds, Kmail shuts down. I have tried deleting the index files in the ~/home/Mail folder and that got me nothing.
I have tried reinstalling kdeaddons-kontact to no avail. Fortunately installing Mozilla Thunderbird got me back on but I need/want to use Kmail.
Dear Richard, Haven't seen you getting any other replies, so I'll offer this: The only times I've seen Kmail disappearing is when there are bad files in its path. Using reiserfs 3.6 (Stock Suse 8.2 and 9.0) I've seen memory glitches create un-listable or un-readable files. These persist over reboots and cause horrible flakeyness as any process that references them locks up inextricably. You can test by doing a "du" of that branch of the filesystem. If it returns, you probably don't have such files. Kmail would be reading ~/Mail/ and ~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc but run it over your home directory. grep -rI something-unlikely ~/ would also give a good test, anything that reads all the files and doesn't generate too much output. If you DO have such files present that terminal window will go catatonic. Pop it. You can localize the problem until you find the exact file. (Murphy will make sure it's irreplaceable, perhaps your vmware virtual hard disk) To fix them, unmount that partition (for / you'll have to boot a rescue system of the Suse CD) and do a reiserfsck of the relevant partition. ie:reiserfsck /dev/hda1 It will just check the partition, and fail to find any problem, BUT FIX IT. This has happened to me more than once, but I've never heard anyone else report it. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with similar experiences, michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166