[Users] WOW!! Stumbled upon a really nasty situation...

[Pierre Fortin]

Hi,

[I'm not going to bug this -- situation became too convoluted and log
info was lost due to too much strace output, and the fact that *.log
files could have helped if there was a way to specify a logrotate number;
rather than the current *.log.bak which gets lost too easily in
trouble-shooting sessions.]

Background:  I've been running 2 instances of CM for years...  about a
year ago, I sorted the 100 filters in one.  Today, I decided it was time
to tackle the 152 filters in the second instance...  

To 'save time' (big mistake :) did:
  $ cat matcherrc | sort > matcherrc.new
  $ mv matcherrc matcherrc.unsorted
  $ mv matcherrc.new matcherrc
  $ claws-mail &

Needless to say, the matcherrc that CM read in now started with:
  [filtering]
  [postglobal]
  [preglobal]
which surely contributed to the following issues by moving all my
filters from [filtering] to [preglobal]...

This seems to have triggered a bug(s) that are hard to quantify...  and
strace generated so much output that the original console output is no
longer available...

The symptoms were:
- CM GUI did not come up.
- ps showed status as "tl" which I can find in the man pages
- ^C was ignored; had to use ^Z and "kill -9"
- syntax errors from gtkhtml2 ending with something like:
    A href="mailto:user at domain.tld"
- a folder not used in a long time (messages dated 12/12/11-04/07/12)
  contains 131 messages. 60 of those messages were marked as New and
  processed causing them to be forwarded to a colleague.  (I have no idea
  if others were handled that way too; but the above syntax errors may be
  a clue that something similar may have happened there too)


I can accept that much of this can be attributed a 1-D-10-T error code :)
but what I can't attribute to this error code is how nearly half the
messages in a long unused folder got marked "New"...  I've examined the
messages and can find no commonality as to why only those messages were
marked New.  EXCEPT for this oddity:
- 1-42 unread
- 43-102 New
- 103-132 unread
which, when sorted by date has this incredible oddity: all of the
previously _received_ messages (now not in numerical order) are in
alternating groups of FOUR!?:
  2 unread
  4 New
  4 unread
  4 New
  ...
  4 unread
  4 New
  2 unread
with sent-and-saved-here messages randomly interspersed within.
WEIRD!!!

The rule that ended up being handled as [preglobal] is (obfuscated):
from matchcase "@source.tld" |
 from matchcase "sourceuser@"
 redirect 3 "First Last <flast at firstlast.com>"
 move "#mh/Mailbox/inbox/01_SourceUser"


I realize this is not much to go on, and testing virtually impossible;
but maybe there's enough to someday find some code that falls through in
some obscure way...

Future enhancements that might also be useful are:
- add logrotate style backups of log files
- simple sort feature to Filtering (already requested quicksearch)

Pierre