[Users] claws-mail and file system corruption

[wwp]

Hello Brian,


On Mon, 04 May 2020 06:45:37 +0200 briand at pounceofcats.com <briand at pounceofcats.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I hesitate to even bring this up, but i can't seem to figure out what's going on and i'm reaching for the very, extremely, improbable.
> 
> Twice now i've had filesystem corruption (linux, ext4) and the majority of the recovered data from fsck were files/folders in Mail.  which seems reasonable (because it's touched frequenctly) except
> 
> 1 i don't get that much mail
> 2 i'm doing lots of file editing working on, for example, source code and not seeing _any_ problems.
> 3 i've had 2 incidences and the second one was exclusively in the Mail folder
> 
> i have used claws-mail for many, many years (it's a great program !) and _never_ seen a problem, but as i said i'm looking at the very, very improbable.
> 
> it looks to me like claws mail does very simple folder/file organization, and would tend to do disk IO on a file basis,  as opposed to "low level" disk reads/writes.  is this correct ?

This is correct. It doesn't play magics or tricky things, only uses I/O
functions available on common and allowed APIs - which doesn't mean
system libraries aren't not buggy.


> can anyone think of any wacky situation where claws-mail might somehow corrupt the filesystem ? perhaps if there was bad information in a config file somewhere causing it to do bogus writes, or ... ?
> 
> Sorry to bring up such an improbable scenario, but i'm running out of ideas
> 
> p.s. it also occurs to me that some _other_ application is doing bogus writes and they are simply ending up in the Mail folder by coincidence. not sure how i might track something like that down.
> p.p.s i'm running out of ideas because every disk access test i've run says the disk drive is fine.

I use Claws Mail on ext4 for ages and never encountered such problem.
It's unlikely that CM is related to your fs issues.

What kind of file or folders? When does that happen? What system?
"Linux" is too vague.

while we're at it, is the option "use secure file deletion if possible
ticked in the preferences, nuder Other/Misc?


Regards,

-- 
wwp
https://useplaintext.email/
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