[sylpheed:31847] Re: Moving mail to new machine

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:58:45 -0600
Bob White <bob at bob-white.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:52:07 -0700
> John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> > I have been using Sylpheed for a couple years under Ubuntu amd64,
> > starting with Hoary. I currently can no longer boot the computer
> > due to a hard disk problem, although I do have a full system backup
> > from just a couple days earlier. The only upgrades I have ever made
> > were whatever came into the Ubuntu repositories, but since I can't
> > boot the old system I don't know for sure what version I had.
> > 
> > I have created a new installation of Ubuntu Gutsy amd64 and have
> > installed Sylpheed 2.4.5. I copied the ~/Mailboxes folder, as well
> > as .claw and .sylpheed-2.-0. It all appears fine, except when I try
> > to get new messages it logs into the server, finds the number of new
> > messages, then pops up an error message "Can't write file."
> > 
> > I'm also afraid it won't be able to send this message, but if it
> > appears on the list, at least y'all will know that part is working.
> > Probably something is missing, but I need help figuring out what it
> > is.
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> When you copied your files from the backup they undoubtedly had
> different owner and group ID's.  From a terminal window
> 'chown -R username.group Mailboxfolder'
> 
> Do the same for the other affected folders.  You may need to use sudo
> to make the changes, i.e.  
> 'sudo chown -R username.group Mailboxfolder'
> 
> Usually the username and group will be the same but you can see what
> the other files in your installation are set at with 'ls -l'
> 
> The message got to the list, but probably not to your sent folder. :)

Thanks to you and Ingo for the response. Before I go on, I should add
that I saw the message go out, but Bob's guess was absolutely on target
- it never got written to the Sent folder. And I have also observed
that all my folders appear correct, but when I click on them none of
the messages appear in the message window. So not only can it not write
to the Mailboxes folder, but it cannot read it either. It's as if it is
looking at its configuration file and finding the folder structure
hierarchy, but not looking at the right folder to find the messages.

I tried the following:

chown -R jjj:jjj ~/Mailboxes
id
uid=1000(jjj) ... followed by cdrom, scanner, etc. and ending with
1000(jjj)
ls -n ~/Mailboxes
total 4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 1000 1000 0 2005-11-29 Drafts
-rwxr-xr-x 1 1000 1000 0 2005-12-24 Inbox
-rwxr-xr-x 1 1000 1000 0 2005-11-29 Sent
-rwxr-xr-x 1 1000 1000 0 2005-11-29 Trash

The last one is interesting because I do have those four folders, but I
also have about 30 more. On the other hand, those four (plus Queue) are
default folders and the others are all folders that I created. I don't
know what all that means.

Several months ago I built myself a new desktop and put Sylpheed on it
as well, but set all three of my accounts upo so that this Sylpheed
will leave the messages on the server. My purpose was to have an
alternative way to check e-mail in case something happened to the
laptop, which I use as my main computer. Good thing I did that!

I'm sure my data is all OK, it's just a question of figuring out how to
get the new installation to read the ~/Mailbox folder.