How to debug 'ignoring non-mail file' issues

[Perttu Luukko]

On 2014-09-03 19:03:40, Jani Nikula wrote:
> On Wed, 03 Sep 2014, Perttu Luukko <perttu.luukko at iki.fi> wrote:
> > What I mean that there would be a separate error for cases "Does not
> > resemble an email message at all", i.e., some control file your mail
> > server happens to store in the mailbox, and "Looks like mail but we
> > can't parse it", i.e., better find out why it can't be parsed to avoid
> > potentially important messages going missing from the database.
> 
> As I said, GMime does not tell us the difference between the two.

There could be a separate parsing step that reads the first kilobyte or
so and checks whether it is text, and whether there is a line starting
with "From: " and possibly other headers. This could be run if GMime
thinks the file is not mail so there would be negligible overhead.

This is just a suggestion. Notmuch users are probably quite experienced
so they can always investigate on their own why their emails are being
ignored. But there could be more warning about ignored messages.
Something like, at the end of each 'notmuch new' output: "Note: some
files were ignored as non-mail. Check the list at
~/mail/.notmuch/ignored-files and adjust your ~/.notmuch-config".

-- 
Perttu