Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 353411
kmail hangs
Last modified: 2008-08-08 13:35:00 EDT
Description of problem: After upgrading to the latest for F7, kmail quit working. When I open it, it says its synchronizing with imap forever. I've let it run for 3hrs and its still doing something. Strace shows it scrolling this: ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0 ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0 ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0 ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0 ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0 ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0 ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0 and ltrace shows this: _ZN12KApplication14x11EventFilterEP7_XEvent(0x7fffb42f0210, 0x7fffb42efea0, 1, 0, 0) = 0 _ZN12KApplication14x11EventFilterEP7_XEvent(0x7fffb42f0210, 0x7fffb42efa10, 1, 0, 0) = 0 _ZN12KApplication14x11EventFilterEP7_XEvent(0x7fffb42f0210, 0x7fffb42efa10, 1, 0, 0x3a67fd20) = 0 _ZN12KApplication14x11EventFilterEP7_XEvent(0x7fffb42f0210, 0x7fffb42efea0, 1, 0, 0) = 0 _ZN12KApplication14x11EventFilterEP7_XEvent(0x7fffb42f0210, 0x7fffb42efa10, 1, 0, 0) = 0 _ZN12KApplication14x11EventFilterEP7_XEvent(0x7fffb42f0210, 0x7fffb42efa10, 1, 0, 0x3a654f80) = 0 _ZN12KApplication14x11EventFilterEP7_XEvent(0x7fffb42f0210, 0x7fffb42efea0, 1, 0, 0) = 0 _ZN12KApplication14x11EventFilterEP7_XEvent(0x7fffb42f0210, 0x7fffb42efa10, 1, 0, 0) = 0 top shows this: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 4719 sgrubb 20 0 1420m 1.1g 22m R 99 56.3 43:21.94 kmail At times, it makes X unresponsive. If it ever gets to a screensaver, it takes a very long time to log in. I normally have to read and respond to 600-700 emails a day. They are piling up right now. I tried reverting it and the old version doesn't work anymore either. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kdepim-3.5.7-10.svn20070926.ent.fc7
Could you provide detail on how you have kmail configured? acounts types, #'s, etc.? Regardless, this would be a good one to report upstream to http://bugs.kde.org/ to get upstream-dev attention.
Some of the users in my group are having the exact same problem (I do not use imap myself). After updating, imap connection hangs kmail forever. I rebuilt the kdepim package all the way upto svn20071026 with the same problem and I don't see a fix for this in Nov. 2 release. After playing with a user's kmail for a while, going to settings, editing the account settings (no real changes), and saving it, seems to have fixed it for him. This was Friday so I will see if it still a problem. I have one pop account and it does not have this problem. Tnanks
PS: I forgot to say that I upgraded all arts and kde packages to 3.5.8 following the F8 packages (I am running F7 with all the updates) and this problem is there.
In response to comment 2, its an x86_64 machine connecting to imaps, 1 identity, 1 or 2 filters, and over 20000 emails in my inbox. I really need this resolved asap. I get a large number of emails everyday and cannot use F7 for email anymore. Are there specific things you want to know about config? Are there troubleshooting steps? I tried reverting and apparently this update messes something up such that reverting doesn't solve the problem.
If you want movement here, taking this issue upstream (bugs.kde.org) is your best bet. All sings so far point to be a migration issue from stock kdepim -> kdepim-enterprise, and almost certainly not a packaging issue.
Before I take this upstream, is kdepim-3.5.7-10.svn20070926.ent.fc7 a cvs snapshot or an officially supported release by KDE?
It's a snapshot of the kdepim-enterprise branch, which is what is going to become kdepim-3.5.9 official.
I can add that the machines we are having problems is also x86_64 but I do not have i386 to test. If I have time I may try to use the debug package to see if one can find out where it is happening.
Did you report this upstream?
Yes, I reported it to the kdepim mail list yesterday. No one seems interested. I upgraded the machine with the problem to Fedora 8 and the problem is now fixed. I have no idea what fixed it, but something is wrong with the code being shipped in F7 and maybe diffing it with Fedora 8's kmail would show what fixed it.
could be kde-3.5.7 vs kde-3.5.8 too. fwiw, kde-3.5.8 update for F-7 is pending push to updates-testing
Can you try out this test build: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=26132
I have a few comments about this and something else: 1. This was happening to one of my users, I did update kdepim from svn to no avail. What solved it was to use kontact instead. Access kmail from kontact no longer hangs. 2. Rex: The compacting mbox fix was put into the kdepim enterprise svn so it is no longer needed.
kdepim-3.5.8-10.svn20071129.ent.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update kdepim'
kdepim-3.5.8-10.svn20071129.ent.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
I have moved along to Fedora 8. kdepim-3.5.8-10.svn20071129.ent.fc8 still hangs. If you have local folders that filtered results go to and you are using an imap server, its very common to just have kmail completely hang. Nothing responds. Clicking around doesn't seem to help. Clicking the close widget evently pops up a gnome message saying kmail is unresponsive, force quit? When this happens it does not refresh the screen if you've switched between desktops. kmail is very unstable. This happens to me at least once an hour.
Did you try using kmail through kontact? Start kontact first and then choose kmail. You can have kontact display just the kmail if you like. We have solved this problem this way. It seems like something is going wrong during the authentiation if one uses kmail solo.
I tried using kmail via kontact and for 3 days it was much better. But it has also hung requiring a force quit. Running from kontact also loses all the tool bar customizations that I have made.
kdepim-3.5.8-11.svn20080109.ent.fc8 also hangs requiring a forced quit. It also turns out that now there are emails that I cannot delete or view. kmail is steadily becoming worse in quality.
Moving this bug to Fedora-9 since its still a problem. kmail hangs, if you click around while its hung it segfaults. It lost an email I sent this morning and said that its giving up delivering it and I should move it from the outbox to the Trash. Sometimes when viewing email, the font size suddenly increases permanently. I can imagine this as a potential security flaw. Sometimes whole groups of unread email just disappears. Usually it shows up if I quit and restart kontact. Then sometimes an email turns blank and I can't read it for 12 hours as if it needed to refresh a cache after expiring it. The current kmail incarnation is nowhere as stable as it was at F-7 GA.
With the impending release of KDE 4.1 going to close this bug. If you find its is still an issue with the new release please feel free to reopen and add additional comments.
F-9's kde-4.1 update will *not* include kdepim(4), re-opening...
Closing. no one seems interested. Kmail segfaulting all the time is the bigger problem now.