duplicate messages in kmail...
 

Hi,

I'm using Kmail 1.9 with Kontact from KDE 3.5.

I have been having issues receiving duplicate email in Kmail. I am receiving my mail through a non-caching imap server and I have (or at least use to have) kmail set to retrieve messages every minute. The problem was that everytime it checks it pulls down every message in my mailbox again, leaving me with a second copy of every message. The next time it checks for mail it does it all over again giving me a third copy of every message. I checked my mail this morning and had 15346 "new" messages.

I've been trying to find a log for Kmail but all I see is .xsession-errors, which doesn't seem to give any information regarding mail.

Any ideas on where to start?

thanks,
-Me

Okay, well I'm no email guru but I have a couple of ideas. It seems to me that Kmail isn't telling the mail server to delete the files when it downloads them. There is a setting for this. I'm using Kmail 1.7.1 on KDE 3.3.0 but this is pretty universal.

In Kmail select Settings | Configure Kmail. This will create a "Configure Kmail" window. Select the network settings. Click on the "Receiving" tab. You should see your mail account(s). If you have more than one then select the one that is giving you trouble. Click on the "Modify" button. A "Modify Account" window will appear. On the "General" tab you will see a list of buttons to select/deselect options. There is a button labeled "Leave fetched messages on the server". That box should be empty.

The other idea that I had was that you said you are using an imap email server. It is my understanding that imap means to leave the email on the server and pop3 means to delete the email from the server when it is passed to the pop3 client.

I thought that since nobody had responded it wouldn't hurt for me to share my thoughts.

thats for the reply. I will try that when I get back to work next week. For the time being I told kmail to to check mail automatically.


thanks again,
-Me

If you are running KMail in IMAP mode, KMail does not retrieve your mail. It just displays what is available on your IMAP server. It is impossible for KMail to retrieve and delete the e-mail just like in POP3. KMail gives you only a view on the server contents.

That points in the direction that not KMail is the problem, but your IMAP mail server, or rather the thingy that drops the mail in your mail server.

Given that you get duplicate mails, this smells like you have a fetchmail process running somewhere which POPs the mail from you provider, and then drops the fetched mail in your IMAP server's mail box. Fetchmail can "keep" or "delete" the emails when it pops. In your case I suspect it "keeps", but there might be something wrong with the UIDL file, that is the file where fetchmail tracks all signatures of all emails it fetched. If there is something wrong, it keeps fetching the same message over and over.

If you have some other mail server running like exim or sendmail, which gets the mail directly from the sender I am lost, don't know anything about it.

Again, this is only true if you run KMail in IMAP mode. If you use POP3 for mail retrieval in KMail itself it invalidates what I said.

jlinkels

I am only running client software on my linux machine (kmail). The server that I am retrieving mail form is an exchange 2003 server cluster.

With kmail's interval mail checking turned off Duplicate mail messages do not appear on my mac at home (running MS Entourage), nor in my XP box at work.

When interval mail checking is turned on in kmail the issue starts to arise, which leads me to beilieve that is is something with kmail specifically. Maybe kmail can't see that it previousely downloaded a copy of the message and does so again and again? I don't know.

I turned off kmail Thursday afternoon and have yet to receive another duplicate message.

Does kmail have a log location where it places download attempts and completions?

Thanks for the help.

[UPDATE]

This appears to be directly related to spam filtering in kmail.

I recently reinstalled my OS and kmail ran fine for weeks. Until...I turned spam filtering on in kmail. I turned bogo on first and dupliate messages started pouring in within 5 minutes. I removed bogo and did spamassassin (perl) instead. However, the same still occurs.

Is there a way to disable spam filtering without uninstalling entire packages from my system? (preferably a checkbox within kmail?) If not I guess I uninstall spamassassin.

thanks

I have removed all spam filtering software and it is continuing to do re-download messages.

I received an error today saying that kmail could not upload the message. No specific message was given however.

Any ideas?