[JA] Re: please review Juno 5 "dreaded folder collapse"
- From: Robert Avery <rwavery@xxxxxxxx>
- To: juno_accmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 01:08:30 -0500
pccat,
>What do we know about a problem which has occurred in Juno 5 email
client called "dreaded folder collapse?"
Well, if it means what I think it means, I've had my share of them. Under
certain circumstances, Juno's bdb file (binary database message file)
becomes corrupted such that it can't figure out which messages go in
which folders, or perhaps it loses the folder structure altogether.
When this happens, it warns you that Juno has detected a fatal error,
lets you close it, and then tries to recover the next time you restart
Juno, and it sometimes succeeds. I've had that process work only on the
second restart one time. Then everything appears to be back where it
belongs. I recommend exiting out of Juno and restarting it before doing
anything else after that initial, apparently successful, recovery because
I've tried answering, deleting, and composing emails without doing that
only to have Juno crash again, this time irrecoverably. Or maybe that's
just because the same unknown conditions were present that caused it to
crash in the first place.
When Juno can't recover its folders, it creates one big folder that has
everything: your Inbox, your Outbox, your Sent folder, your Deleted
folder, and all of your archives. And when it does this, it usually
(always?) forgets its message attributes as well, leaving everything in
this new huge folder marked New (unread). (The message headers are
generally preserved, it seems.) Then you have this huge mess to wade
through by hand and prune as necessary. When this happens, you start to
think in terms of harikari or maybe sending Charles Ardai off for some
extraordinary rendition.
Of course, if you are really unlucky, and Juno can't even do that much,
you need Larry's superduper juno5bdb program to create the same big,
one-size-fits-all folder for you.
OK, so what are the circumstances? I don't know: low memory (ram), low
disk space, doing "too many deletes" at once on a large database (seems
to be a common thread), doing a lot of inbox folder sorting back and
forth (sorting by date, name, subject, up, down...)? Maybe a combination
of these factors?
It does seem often to involve fairly large databases, thousands of
messages, but not always. I've had it let me go over 6,000 messages
before it crashed, and I had it crash once with just a few hundred
messages. Maybe it's just a matter of when your luck happens to run out.
How do you keep it from happening? I'm sure not the guy to ask! (:-)
I think the safest thing would be to exit Juno every time you pull down
your mail, then save your database file to another directory or copy it
to a new name, and then restart Juno and process your mail. You'll get so
sick of doing this that the habit won't last long, and if you have a
large database, Juno will take eons to load itself. If you are going to
be doing mass deletes, maybe exit out of Juno periodically to give it
time to catch its breath and/or empty the deleted message folder. That
might help.
The other safety thing is to make sure you have plenty of ram/disk
resources available for your program, and who knows, maybe the latest
version of the Windows OS. (I'm running W98se.) Perhaps those are the
most important things, not to mention no ram memory errors, corrupt
Windows register stack, or similar flaky hardware.
The one silver lining is that I've never lost my address book when this
has happened. It appears to leave that one uncorrupted. Thank goodness!
That's my most important folder.
I hope I'm not repeating everything Larry said in those two links I
didn't get online to read. If so, I apologize.
Bob Avery
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