Offlineimap erroneously deletes 10,000 emails

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 05:39:03PM +0200, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> On Thu, 19 May 2011 13:36:46 +0100, seanh <snhmnd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Deleting 9810 messages (...) in Maildir [Archive], LocalStatus[Archive]
> > 
> > where the (...) was the identifiers of 9810 messages, i.e. the entire
> > contents of my Archive folder containing several years worth of archived
> > personal emails. Fortunately I killed offlineimap after it had managed
> > to delete only a couple of thousand emails, and before it had synced
> > this change up to the IMAP server and deleted the emails from the server
> > as well (which would have lost them completely).
> 
> Glad, you could prevent major damage. First of all, 6.2.0 is basically 3
> years old and the maintainers of offlineimap have changed since. I
> believe the first version, that we support is 6.3.2 or so.

We support back to v6.3.2.2.

> > Is this a bug in the offlineimap code? Or a bug in offlineimap's sync
> > algorithm? Was there a glitch in the IMAP server that caused it to
> > momentarily report the contents of the Archive folder as empty and
> > trigger a catastrophic response from offlineimap? Is there a safe way to
> > use offlineimap so that I can be protected from losing mail in events
> > like this?
> 
> Again, all I can recommend is to update to the latest offlineimap, and
> take debug logs.
> 
> It would be a pity to lose an opportunity to make offlineimap more
> robust against failure.

I'd say that a long story to tell us how emails loss is a pity don't
help much. Giving us a log or backstrace and information about the
server and versions is much more usefull.

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht