Evolution won't parse messages, stuck on "Formating message ..." in the status bar

thanks for your bug report, you should probably open the bug on bugzilla.gnome.org too where the people writting the code will read it, there is no evolution hacker there and your issue seems rather specific

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

Mr. Bacher,

  This bug happens on its own and at any time without me doing anything
special to provoke it. It just happens at random throughout the day when
trying to simply click on any message, be it old or new. Single click,
double click - it doesn't matter. At that point I have to kill Evolution
and then kill the evolution-alarm-notify, which when killed pulls down
the drain with it the evolution-data-server-2.24 as well. I guess it's
the dependant process so it has to. This is extremely annoying to me and
other posts on the Internet that I red tell me that I'm not the only one
having this very same problem. I can honestly tell you that lately on
average I have to go through this at least 5 times a day. I tried
changing my default system, desktop and application fonts from Verdana
to Ariel (yes, ttf fonts) to no avail. Something as simple as trying to
read a message whether in preview pane or in the open window should not
be so difficult to accomplish. The server is an Exchange 2003 Standard
version with all the latest patches and fixes.

Dragan Tomas

On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 23:22 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:

> Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:
>
> * Is this reproducible?
> * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?
>
> This will help us to find and resolve the problem.
>
> ** Changed in: evolution (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>

You can also see the same issue in Jaunty with it's latest Evolution build. All of the messages I receive are in HTML, so I can't tell you if the same bug would happen on a plain text message. One moment I'd be reading a message in one folder and the next moment I can't read any messages. That's all I can give you for now. If you have any bright idea how this can be traced or troubleshooted I'd be happy to try.

BTW, I did open a bug report in Bugzilla about this. Thanks for the advice.

could you give the bugzilla url so we can add a bug watch there?

the upstream bugs suggest that could be fixed in jaunty, could you try using the new version?

Here it is:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=361145

On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 20:45 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:

> could you give the bugzilla url so we can add a bug watch there?
>

Nope, it's not fixed in Jaunty. See my comments in this bug report on
Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=361145

However, I am downloading more updates for Jaunty as I type this
response to you (about 77 new updates). I don't know if any of them will
prove that a fix has been found, but we'll see. Some suggested that as a
workaround I turn off showing pictures in messages, but this problem
happens regardless what kind of an HTML message i try to open, most of
them don't even have any pictures, only different font colors or
italics.

On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 23:32 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:

> the upstream bugs suggest that could be fixed in jaunty, could you try
> using the new version?
>

This has just started happening for me - only with html messages, but 100% reproducible.

Though I should add that the non-response has been going on for a long time (don't recall how many versions): when evolution has decided it is doing something it's non-response to a window closure circumvents the window manager's monitoring of that, so a killall is the oply thing that will close the window. This I think is a significant failing in the UI.

It still exist in Lucid. And evolution-data-server use a half of the processor

I updated to maverick, and this isn't present anymore.

Update to 2.28.3 has since solved the problem.

This bug was fixed in the package evolution - 2.32.0-0ubuntu1

---------------
evolution (2.32.0-0ubuntu1) natty; urgency=low

  * Upstream release 2.32.0
    - Empty reply quotation for HTML messages (LP: #630566, #659513)
    - "Encrypt to self" by default on newly created mail (LP: #326979)
    - Backup settings uses unhelpful yes/no dialog (LP: #572985)
    - Can't drag email addresses to Contact List Editor (LP: #282530)
    - Contact List Editor calls wrong EDestination function (LP: #229187)
    - Allow normal, non-vFolder, Trash and Junk folder (LP: #13983, #64762)
      (LP: #135485, #280325, #365270)
    - Allow change of signature hash algorithm (LP: #381290, #381295, #635937)
    - Dialog for mark-all-read always mentions subfolders (LP: #608462)
    - Evolution allows deletion of default views (LP: #498040)
    - Add checks for event->comp_data != NULL (LP: #466415, #546952)
    - Properly free unused message infos periodically (LP: #507972)
    - Calendar compressed weekend print improvement (LP: #88926)
    - Attachment bar causes drawing issues in RTL locales (LP: #545459)
    - [PST] evolution crashed with SIGSEGV (LP: #471852)
    - Swap "Save" and "Save as Draft" accelerators in composer (LP: #424416)
    - Evolution hangs when formatting message - fixes part of it (LP: #175233)
      (LP: #327775)
    - Calendar Day view All Day events print improvements (LP: #88926)
    - Crash on a changed mail filter action removal (LP: #452921)
    - Do not block UI with publish-calendar messages (LP: #594289)
    - Duplicate mnemonic in meeting window (LP: #499418)
    - Hide variable used only with HAVE_LIBNOTIFY (LP: #594289)
  * debian/patches/02_fix_missing_include_for_composer.patch: refreshed
  * debian/patches/03_lpi.patch: refreshed
  * debian/patches/12_remove_not_recommended_for_top_posting.patch: updated.
    The "recommended" text is now a separate label, so removing that object
    entirely.
  * debian/patches/89_express.patch: dropped, applied upstream.
  * debian/patches/90_disable_deprecation_warning.patch: refreshed
  * debian/patches/91_add_u1_email_translations.patch: refreshed
  * debian/patches/91_git_additional_chinese_translations.patch: dropped
  * debian/patches/91_git_fix_e_shell_ref_counting.patch: dropped
  * debian/patches/91_git_fix_untranslatable_list_editor.patch: dropped
  * debian/patches/92_git_fix_proxy_ignore_hosts.patch: dropped
  * debian/patches/92_git_only_hide_signature_on_express.patch: dropped
  * debian/control: update Depends/Build-Depends of all e-d-s parts to 2.32
  * debian/control: libgdata was split out of e-d-s, so updating Build-Depends
    to use the external libgdata library.
  * debian/control: bump libgtkhtml Build-Depends to >= 1:3.31.90
  * debian/*.install: install plugins to /usr/lib/evolution/2.32, not 2.30
  * debian/rules: remove --disable-pilot-conduits, it's not a valid configure
    switch anymore
  * debian/evolution-dev.install: no longer install libeconduit.so
  * debian/control: update Build-Depends with new and updated requirements for
    2.32: adding libpango1.0-dev, libgail-dev, updating libglib2.0-dev,
    libgtk2.0-dev, gnome-icon-theme and libunique-dev
  *...