How to debug 'ignoring non-mail file' issues

[Tomi Ollila]

On Mon, Sep 01 2014, Perttu Luukko <perttu.luukko at iki.fi> wrote:

> On 2014-08-31 07:41:42, David Bremner wrote:
>> Perttu Luukko <perttu.luukko at iki.fi> writes:
>> > The vast majority of these ignored mails are not ignored after I
>> > transfer them with offlineimap to another computer. I can non-ignore
>> > these files probably by copying the renamed file back to the mail
>> > server, so this is fixable. Offlineimap shouldn't mess with the file's
>> > contents, so is there something that can cause notmuch to ignore a file
>> > based on its name?
>> 
>> The most likely cause is that the files are mboxes, whether intentional
>> or not.  In particular if they start with a "From " (note the lack of :)
>> and contain a second "From " at the beginning of a line later in the
>> file. In this case something like sed can replace the initial 
>> "From " with "X-Envelope-From: ".
>> 
>> I agree that the error message could be more informative in this case.
>
> No, the mails do contain "From: " with the appropriate colon. If I
> understood correctly notmuch returns the same "not mail" return code

The question here is whether the very first line of the mail file begins
with 'From ', not whether *any* of the actual header line starts with 'From: '
IIRC the mails get accepted even the 'From:' header were missing...

> both when the essential headers are missing (so the file probably really
> isn't mail) and when GMime fails to parse the message. I think it would
> be a good idea to give a different warning in the latter case.

Sure... :D

>
> If the files really are ignored because of GMime it also explains why so
> much more files are ignored on my mail provider's server than on my
> laptop. The server probably has an older version of GMime. I'll upgrade
> and see if that makes a difference.
>
> -- 
> Perttu


Tomi