[plug] Evolution crash

[Gavin Chester]

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 19:14 +0800, Jim Leven wrote:
> Dear Gavin
> 
> Thanks for your assistance – to respond.

-snip-

> '/var' and/or '/tmp' is/are not full; 
> 
> No

Worth me asking because it can cause problems if not watched/realised -
caught me out once :-)

> haveyou forced a shutdown of evo by issuing either "evolution
> --force-shutdown" or the older (and
> 
> better?) "/opt/gnome/lib/evolution/2.6/killev"; 
> 
> Will try

Only worth doing if you haven't rebooted, of course ;-)

> howdid you reinstall 
> 
> Using Yast and the SLED DVD

Whether it applies here or not, and whether you do it via a gui (like
yast) or not, you should always remove an rpm package before
reinstalling it to fix a problem.  Yast allows you to remove a package
or you can do it from the command line by executing 'rpm -e evolution'
as superuser. 

> haveyou tried winding back to an earlier version temporarily to see if
> the problem persists; 
> 
> No, as I would really like to preserve the existing mail

If you wind back a version or install a newer version all your mail and
settings are preserved.  It's only when they do a MAJOR version re-write
(or you do a BIG upgrade jumping several versions) that you have trouble
and need to import mail, etc.  So relax, but backup your
'/home/jim/.evolution' folder just in case :-) 

As Bill K. said in his reply, it's a known quirk of evo to crash on
certain mails so you might try an minor upgrade as a fix.  I recommend
that you try smart for getting online updates (search previous emails
for my positive rants about smart).  

-snip-

>  Alternatively, if the email is already in your 'inbox and you suspect
> it stopping evo starting then you might want to try manually editing
> the mbox file to delete the mail (I haven't had to do this myself so I
> presume it is do-able and won't muck up the mail database).
> 
> Will try.

I haven't tried that myself, so can't speak about whether the index and
data files (that relate to each mbox file) will be upset by editing your
inbox mbox file manually.  Back up the mbox file first and then try
editing the copy.  Don't know if you've tried it before, but an mbox
file can be opened in your favourite text editor and each mail appears
as separate blocks of text.  Deleting the troublesome email _should_ be
as simple as deleting the right block of text - easily identified by the
dates and sender info given in the header block.  Someone jump in here
if I'm giving him a bum steer ;-) 

Gavin.