[mod.computers.vax] New MAIL bug?

carl@CITHEX.CALTECH.EDU (11/05/86)

It seems that when you've got a LOT of messages (I had ~350) in a folder
and you delete a lot of them (I now have 14), that MAIL gets confused
as to which ones you've deleted.  I had deleted all but about 40 of the
original messages, and exited from mail.  Lo and behold, when I ran mail
again, the 40 messages I had left included a number of messages that I
had deleted (and therefore did NOT include a number of messages that I
hadn't deleted).  Has anybody else out there run into this problem?
(Note:  on a couple of occasions, I read messages that had gone into
WASTEBASKET when I found later messages referring to them, then selected
the MAIL folder again).  I've had this happen once before, I think, but
since on the first occasion it was only one message that seemed to have
been misplaced, I chalked it up to a mistake on my part; now I'm not
so certain.

sasaki@HARVARD.HARVARD.EDU (Marty Sasaki) (11/06/86)

> It seems that when you've got a LOT of messages (I had ~350) in a
> folder and you delete a lot of them (I now have 14), that MAIL gets
> confused as to which ones you've deleted...

This is probably not a bug in mail, but a bug in convert. When mail
does it's garbage collection on the file it calls convert to fix up
the file. Either convert is broken or RMS is broken (hopefully the
former).

Of course, the solution is to not have a lot of messages hanging
around in your mail file. Fixed in a later release?
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