[Users] Crashes reset the read status and tags of recent mails

[Paul Steyn]

Hi All,

I just had Claws Mail (version 3.17.3) crash on me. This happens so
occasionally, it isn't really a concern, but I'm running it in a VM,
and from time to time the VM, guest or host OS crashes, which results
in the same thing: Claws Mail terminating abnormally.

Every time this happens, I find that once I start Claws Mail again, a
number of recent mails that have been read get marked as new. This last
time it was a few days worth of emails, and not only did they get
marked as new, but they lost their tags. This is quite an
inconvenience when it does happen.

I've checked, and "Preferences > Other > Miscellaneous > Metadata
handling" is set to "Safer", which is advertised as avoiding data loss
after crashes, but clearly doesn't.

I see from the mailing list archives I've mentioned this before (and it
has been happening since I started using Claws Mail, several years
ago), and I'm not the only one seeing this behaviour, but the suggestion
then was to set the metadata handling to safer, and I didn't follow up
after that, as these crashes aren't that common. However, I can now
confirm that despite the metadata handling being set to safer, crashes
cause Claws Mail to lose the read status of recent messages, and
apparently also the tags. This is also not specific to my current
setup, as it has been happening on at least two different systems, with
different Claws versions. Admittedly, the systems were both Arch Linux
based, and probably both using ext4. The previous one was not in a VM.

Does anybody have any ideas on this? Is there more info I can provide?
Are there other settings to try?



Paul Steyn