missing message in the inbox folder

I have the same kind of problem happening too.

I use evolution 2.12.1 (within Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon) and connect to an exchange server via the evolution exchange plugin.

Login is ok, calendar, tasks , sending email, everything is fine ... except that some emails within the inbox are not showing up.
They are on the exchange server ( as I can see them with the outlook web access) but they never get downloaded on evolution.

I checked out if there was any filter but no ...

I noticed this happens when I previously check my email with Outlook a few moments before swithing to linux and evolution.
This might be related to a sync date problem ?

Thanks for any suggestion;
DrQwill

For info hewre is a workaround :

within the .evolution/mail/exchange folder I removed the folder named username@Exchangeserver (e.g. JohnDoe@ExchangeSvr ) .
As a result evolution redownloaded all emails and now all are showing.

The bug is related to a cache corruption ?

DrQwill

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 [perhaps even with a new user account]?

I can confirm that this still exists in Ubuntu 8.10.

All of a sudden a load of the messages from a folder on the Exchange Server just disappear from within Evolution. Some are left but a load are missing. This is quite dangerous for the user because unless they notice the messages going missing there is no other indication.

Evolution folders seem to get out of sync with those on the Exchange Server and the only way that I have found to correct this is to kill Evolution and delete the local exchange folder (as listed above) and have Evolution re-sync all the messages again. This is obviously a right royal pain.

This bug has been around for ages now - is there any chance of getting this highlighted to the Gnome Evolution Developers?

I can see that there are bugs on the Gnome List and Redhat's Bugzilla.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478151
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=381351

I'm experiencing similar problems with Exchange server 2003, Evolution 2.24.3 using the Exchange Plugin on Ubuntu 8.10.

There seems to be three issues regarding missing emails:

1. A few times a month a few emails can be seen in OWA but not in Evolution, eventually they do appear in Evolution.
2. In certain conditions users permanently loose the ability to see most mail in their Inbox.
3. The Inbox incorrectly reports that there are new messages when according to OWA there are none.

Temporary fixes to the above problems respectively:

1. Exit Evolution, rm -f /home/$USER/.evolution/mail/exchange/$USER@$HOST/folders.db, Start Evolution
2. Exit Evolution, rm -f /home/$USER/.evolution/mail/exchange/$USER@$HOST/folders.db, Start Evolution
3. Exit Evolution, Start Evolution.

My guess to the causes respectively are:

1. Evolution is incorrectly shut down and temporarily goes out of sync.
2.1 Evolution and Microsoft Outlook are used at the same time, or
2.2 The exchange server removes mail older than a certain date, causing Evolution to permanently go out of sync.
3. I haven't see any pattern for this one.

Regarding the first issue:

To make a missing email display, I can go into Outlook Web Access, move the affected email to another folder, then move it back again. Clicking Send/Receive in Evolution then displays the missing email.

Right clicking on Inbox and selecting properties in Evolution shows the correct number of emails on the Exchange server, which is less than the amount shown in Evolution's inbox.

Selecting view hidden messages (View/Show Hidden Messages) does not show the missing messages.

It seems that the missing emails in some cases do eventually show up, but up to a few days later.

My "Receiving options" configuration is :

"Check new messages for Junk contents" has never been enabled and is still disabled.
"Apply filters to new messages in Inbox" was enabled, I've now disabled it.
"Synchronise account locally" was enabled, I've now disabled it.

The problem seems to be very intermittent, I'd guess its around 1 in a hundred emails don't display on time, and if the email shows up a few hours or even a day late you might not realize there had been a problem.

Regarding the second issue:

Our Exchange server clears emails out of users inbox if they are older than a certain date. I generally clear out my inbox before messages get to old and I've never experienced the second issue myself. The one user that did have this problem had a very large inbox with a lot of old mail, which would have been purged at some point by exchange.

This same user however was also running Outlook on a separate computer, connecting to the same Exchange account, which might have caused the problem. Possibly though its a combination of running Outlook and having an Inbox that gets cleared out by Exchange?

This bug in various forms has been around for well over a year, some of the other places its been reported:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435371
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442098
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478151
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497949
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489236...

I'd imagine the reason these problems are receiving so little attention is because Zimbra Desktop is a far better MUA than Evolution, and a Zimbra server now fully integrates into an Exchange environment.

Zimbra isn't willing to support anything newer than 8.04 (see http://www.zimbra.com/forums/installation/29037-instalation-ubuntu-9-04-a.html#post136211 ) It would be bad if this didn't get any attention because it's being replaced by a product that won't be available for another year.

Does anyone have a workaround for the "missing message" problem (particularly #1) in Evolution on Jaunty?

Guess you could run a supported Linux distribution as a XEN virtualized server in Ubuntu, or just use a supported distribution for the Zimbra server side?

I am using Evolution 2.24.5 on Fedora 10. I don't think the distro is important here. I am seeing this same issue. I typically move my email to an archive folder when I think I am done with it, so I rarely have more than 100 emails in my inbox. However, some of them can be a few weeks old.

This is germane because I will have random incidents where some messages will disappear from Evolution. It's not all messages or even all messages before X date. It's not all messages received after some point in time. Sometimes it will be messages a few minutes old. Sometimes messages from a few days ago. But I will generally still retain some messages both newer and older than the disappearing messages. I have noticed that threads tend to disappear as an atomic unit. The disappearances tend to happen after restarting Evolution which I mainly have to do on reboot, but I believe some occurrences happened when simply changing folders.

The messages are not really gone. I can log into Webmail (Is there any other user interface that screams, "We hate users!" quite so vociferously?) and still get to them. Sometimes moving them to another folder and moving them back to the inbox will cause them to reappear in Evolution, sometimes not.

When messages disappear like this, the unread count for the inbox goes haywire. Sometimes it will reflect the new messages I can see in Evolution. Sometimes it will reflect the new count on the server. Sometimes it will reflect a random number in between.

As reported by others, I only see this with Exchange. I never have problems with my local archive folder.

Seeing the advice above about removing folders.db, I tried to see if I could narrow it down. I did this:
- Shutdown Evolution
- Made a backup of folders.db
- sqlite3 folders.db
- delete from 'personal/Inbox';
- Started Evolution

This worked for me. Just clearing that one table forced a server resync for the inbox folder. It definitely seems like a corruption issue. If it helps, the missing messages were no longer in the personal/Inbox table at all. It wasn't a matter of having corrupt data in the table. I had 39 messages in my table before I purged and 111 after I resynced.

This doesn't work for me. The problem is that, if I close Evolution, I'm sorta committing my inbox, and then my OWA (browser mail), will be missing the same emails I was missing in Evolution. If I were to kill evolution, delete folders.db and start, It'll show the missing emails (matching OWA), but only while updating, as at one point, some emails will disappear. I'm running Evolution 2.26.1, connecting to an Exchange Server 2003. I also receive my exchange emails on my iPhone, which it's always in sync with my OWA.

I also see these messages when Evolution Starts:

(evolution:7051): camel-exchange-provider-WARNING **: Unable to load Exchage summary for folder personal/Inbox: no such table: personal/Inbox

(evolution:7051): camel-exchange-provider-WARNING **: Unable to load Exchage summary for folder personal/ALERTS: no such table: personal/ALERTS

This is a fresh OS install, as I just installed Jaunty 3 days ago, only in an attempt to fix this issue.

I have similar problems in Evolution 2.28.1 under Ubuntu 9.10, but it is not new for me in this version, I have had this before. Some new message arrives and the inbox in the folders bar shows that there is one unread message, but when I click on the inbox the messages window still says "There are no messages in this folder". I have to go in via webmail to see it.

I have a feeling that the problem has something to do with the format of the incoming mail. The mail that does not show up in Evolution is usually spam, but mail from a few specific colleagues of mine also trigger this behavior. Not consistently, however.

This has not something to do with the format of the messages. There is one folder where I get a daily report, always in the same format, and it is now missing 2 messages from the past 2 days however it did show up as a new message in the header but never in the actual folder. Very annoying.

I have a similar problem, although the missing messages have in common that they usually are cc'd to me instead of directly addressed. As an aside: I don't get how a bug like this which causes mail to be lost from an end-user's perspective can be assigned such a low priority. It is like saying that the dog ate your homework and expecting to get away with it.

Some additional information:

- just deleting the folders.db file does not necessarily make it work;
- deleting the $home/.evolution/exchange directory makes it work again until the second (not the first upon startup of Evolution) synchronisation with Exchange, then all of a sudden all later mails disappear in my case.

The bug still lives in 2.28.1.
I found that it should be related with filtering somehow.

In my mailbox settings I turned off 'Apply filters to new messages in Inbox on this server', deleted the folders as described above, and after the next synchronization I can see all of the missing messages.
I have no local mail filters set up, but when this box was checked, I can see my messages while the filtering process was running, but they disappeared immediately when this process finished, but still counted as unread in Inbox.

I had the same problem and found this topic by googling. I've tried removing the user@server subdirectory with no luck at all. My company also removes old mail automatically. Every week it takes items that are (I think) older than 90 days and moves them to a System Cleanup folder (into subfolders named Inbox, Sent, Trash, etc.) They stay there for 60 more days before being turfed.

I did two things, one of which must have fixed the problem. First, I stopped Evolution (as well as the background tasks involved -- do ps -ef | grep evol and kill -9 everything but hte grep command). Then, on the Outlook side (on my laptop):

1. Exited Outlook.
2. After re-starting Outlook, I went through the System Cleanup folders, deleted stuff I really didn't want to keep, and moved the rest to the corresponding subfolders of my Archived Mail folder (stored on the local hard drive, not on the Exchange server).

Then I restarted Evolution and my Inbox was full again. I don't see how re-starting the Outlook client had anything to do with fixing the problem, so it's more likely that it had more to do with cleaning out the System Cleanup folder.

This bug keeps hitting me once every 2 months. For now, I run the following script, and it resyncs for me.

#!/bin/bash

PRESENTDIR=`pwd`;
/usr/bin/evolution --force-shutdown

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then

    cd /<email address hidden>/personal
    mv summary sub.summary 2>/dev/null; mv summary-meta sub.summary-meta 2>/dev/null

    cd subfolders/Inbox/
    mv summary sub.summary 2>/dev/null; mv summary-meta sub.summary-meta 2>/dev/null
fi

cd $PRESENTDIR

I can confirm this bug still occur in 10.04.1 (lucid) x64. I've over 10000+ messages in inbox, but suddenly it just show only the newest 9 messages when i come back to office in the morning.
When i checked the terminal for any errors, it just said "error syncing up the counts". If i try to refresh the inbox folder by right-click the folder menu, the status will show error, something like "losing connection to background process". After several trial of "evolution --force-shutdown", it can sync the inbox again (looks like it can get the message count correctly), and start re-downloading the headers/summary.

My ubuntu is fully patched, and the related packages are shown below:
$ dpkg -l 'evolution*' | grep ii
ii evolution 2.28.3-0ubuntu10 groupware suite with mail client and organizer
ii evolution-common 2.28.3-0ubuntu10 architecture independent files for Evolution
ii evolution-couchdb 0.4.5-0ubuntu1 Evolution support for CouchDB databases
ii evolution-data-server 2.28.3.1-0ubuntu5 evolution database backend server
ii evolution-data-server-common 2.28.3.1-0ubuntu5 architecture independent files for Evolution D
ii evolution-data-server-dbg 2.28.3.1-0ubuntu5 evolution database backend server with debuggi
ii evolution-dbg 2.28.3-0ubuntu10 debugging symbols for Evolution
ii evolution-exchange 2.28.3-0ubuntu1 Exchange plugin for the Evolution groupware su
ii evolution-indicator 0.2.8-0ubuntu1 GNOME panel indicator applet for Evolution
ii evolution-plugins 2.28.3-0ubuntu10 standard plugins for Evolution
ii evolution-webcal 2.28.0-1 webcal: URL handler for GNOME and Evolution
$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS
Release: 10.04
Codename: lucid