Inbox started randomly deleting and re-adding messages

[timmus]

I have been a very satisfied user of Pocomail going back to the early 2000s. I'm actually still using 3.0.3.1740. I've had a weird problem pop up in the past month, with two main symptoms described beow:

* The Inbox starts losing messages. In other words, I'll see 104 messages in the Inbox, close the program, start it again, and then it shows 72 messages. If I restore a backup of the in.* files I'll see the 104 messages again, but deleting In.idx and restarting Pocomail, shows 104 messages when I bring up Pocomail again, so I guess the index was corrupt.

* I'll start with 134 Inbox messages, go through them all, sort and delete messages, and whittle it down to 22 messages. When I restart Pocomail, I see the same 134 messages reappear in the Inbox again, as if I had made no changes! Interestingly the messages that were moved to other mailboxes are there where I had put them.

I am not sure what is causing this problem and I can't find a pattern to it yet. Pocomail had worked fine up until this fall and I made no changes to my system, to Pocomail, or to the settings, so I am wondering if maybe I am getting regular spams that have content which corrupt the inbox somehow or prevent the index (in.idx) from being built properly. I am just taking a guess, though... I don't even know where to start.

[MarkB]

First, try this:

Universal 3-Step First Aid for PocoMail Mailbox Problems

1. Back up your mail.
2. Compress all folders (via the Folder menu).
3. Close and re-open PocoMail.

Don't check mail, and prevent automatic mail checks, during the compression process.

[NZRussell]

Have found that compressing folders helps but never thought about turning off the automatic mail check. I will in future. Thanks.

[MarkB]

Have found that compressing folders helps but never thought about turning off the automatic mail check. I will in future. Thanks.

Possibly try this: Close and re-open Poco to re-initiate the timers (assuming it does). Wait for any automatic mail check at startup to finish. Then fit in a compaction before the first timed check.

I do not know that there is a problem with receiving mail during compaction. Perhaps Pocomail 4 can accommodate this, perhaps by pausing downloads or by caching the new mail and waiting. But years ago Michael M. gave a warning related to this on the forum -- and the OP's mbx files are possibly enormous, comprising mostly slack, and compaction might take ages, so better safe than sorry.

[ente]

Hello MarkB (or whoever nows about this),
glad to see that you are still around in this forum! Right now I have the same problem (with my laptop in Olargues...) I came here today looking for a posting that recomended to delete the index file to force Pocomail to reindex the inbox. Unfortunately that mail seems to have disappeared. I wanted to check which of the files is the index file.
ente

[MarkB]

Hi, ente. It's good to hear from you. Olargues! I'm envious.

As to which files are index files ... for the whole story, here is a copy-and-paste from PocoMail Help.

[QUOTE]
Mail - email folder files by extension:

.mbx for email message storage. There is one mbx file for each folder you see in the folders tree.

.idb for folder index. There is one idb file for each folder. Index files help the program to search faster.

.~mbx is an automatic backup of the .mbx file, created under certain conditions, and doesn't have to be present for each email folder

.dat files store folder settings (custom layout, threading, favourite status and many more ... )

Regular folder is represented by the above files.

If some folder has sub-folders, it will also appear as a folder of same name under Mail folder, and the files of the sub-folders will end up in that folder.
[END QUOTE]

The default location of PocoMail data is the AppData folder. In Windows 10, that is
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Pocomail
To see the AppData folder, enable Folder Options/View/"Show hidden files, folders and drives" in Windows if necessary.

Back up before tinkering.

/MarkB