Zombie emails

[Rachel Ambler]

Still trying to firm up what's going on here, but this is what I think it might be.

When doing a search we're finding sporadic occasions where a deleted email will seemingly show up in a search. When selected, AM complains about the message being missing and sometimes manages to return parts of it.

It's still early days in our investigation ad to what's going on and I'd really like to get something tangible before I raise it as an official bug report.

However if you've heard of anything like this and know why then please let me know.

Failing that I'll see what from I can't put together another easy example to show to issue at hand, along with some nice juicy log files.

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[Kostya Vasilyev]

Haven't heard about this before.

Is this a local (POP3, or all-accounts-all-folders-loaded-messages) search or an IMAP server search?

Are these zombie messages actually on the server? Can you use web mail to check?

[Rachel Ambler]

Not sure on the search type. It's my better half who's having the issue so I'll need to check with her to see what she's doing.

That said, it is an IMAP Google Apps account and no, the emails are not on the server. They don't however seem to be picked up on a search so my guess at this juncture is that she's doing a local search and these are recently deleted emails that the search sometimes picks up.

I'll let you know if we get any further.

We now return you to your regular scheduled program 'Exchange Web Services'

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[Rachel Ambler]

Getting a little more information now.

I ran a search on her phone and it returned back, say 6 emails - all of them I'll call Zombie emails. Clicking on any of these emails resulted in being told the message couldn't be found on the server.

Now, let's say that the latest of these emails was from August 6th and was 'found' in the Inbox. At that point I look at AquaMail and it tells me there are say 310 unread emails out of 355 (she has a thing about marking emails as read - don't ask!).

Now, what I did find is that if I went in the Inbox AND started to go back in time in the message list to the point where older emails were being brought back THEN that 355 count started to drop down in value as it refreshed the internal count based upon what it was really seeing. In addition I was unable to see the emails that the Search reported. If I went back to the search THEN it would report non found (because the internal list had been updated possibly).

What I think might be happening is that there may be emails that she delete on either the Gmail web site or on her phone (using AquaMail) which were not 'seen' as being deleted on her tablet when it next reloads emails.

Any of that make any sense? 

I've not tried running a Compact operation yet - I'll try that next.

On the plus side, I finally convinced her to buy a Pro license! 

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Um.

Yes, this is slowly starting to make sense -- since the app syncs only a limited number of messages, and caches more, it won't catch messages being deleted somewhere past the sync window ("messages per page").

Then, a local search will still find those messages -- main window search is local (on-device), and an IMAP folder search runs an on-device search first, then hits the server.

This is a very good find. Not quite sure how to plug this hole, though.

Not having a message cache would be bad.

Should I assume that anything that the server did not find when going back in time (as search progresses) should be deleted from the server? Or double-check the state of all messages found by an on-device search as server side search is working backwards?

Curiousier and curiousier.

[Rachel Ambler]

A thought or 2:

How about when, once the user is looking at the search results that, in the event that AM finds the email missing on the server, it pops up a message telling you that the local content may be out of sync with the server and that a refresh is advised, at which point it could refresh each folder that contains an email present in the search results (or single folders or even no action at all).

In addition, perhaps you could add an additional sync option in that does a full (full and complete, or perhaps user selectable # of messages) sync between local and server. The user could say have that run nightly at 2 when on WIFI.

Just a few thoughts on a Friday night is all.

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