Exception thrown when placing outbox email in a directory outside inbox

samdmarshall commented 7 years ago

I have an alot config that looks like this:

[accounts]
    [[default]]
        sent_box = maildir:///home/samantha/eMail/Outbox/
        draft_box = maildir:///home/samantha/eMail/Drafts/

I store my email in a directory structure that looks like this:

o /home/samantha/eMail
|
+-o Inbox
| +-o new
| +-o cur
| +-o tmp
|
+-o Outbox
| +-o new
| +-o cur
| +-o tmp
|
+-o Drafts
  +-o new
  +-o cur
  +-o tmp

All three Inbox, Outbox, and Draft directories are setup in maildir format, and configured such that none overlap in contents.

Inbox is for all my inbound email, which is fetched by getmail
Outbox is for all outgoing email, sent by msmtp via alot
Drafts is where email that is being composed in alot lives in temporary form

When I compose and then send an email via alot it seems an exception gets thrown and then handled (no crash) due to my Outbox email box not being a subdirectory of the Inbox. So far this has caused no issues for me but it would be nice to not have this exception get thrown this way.

I don't know if i can capture the backtrace properly because it gets drawn over rather quickly after getting printed to screen. Let me know if you need any more info.

pazz commented 7 years ago

Hi samantha, welcome to alot and thanks for the bug report :) Yes, further info from the logfile would be helpful here. You can start alot, for instance with

alot -d debug -l logfile

and trigger the bug. Please post the (interesting suffix of the) logfile here.

samdmarshall commented 7 years ago

Ok, i had alot create the log file like that but it doesn't contain anything about the exception; i was luckily able to capture the output this time:

Unhandled error in Deferred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/twisted/internet/_baseprocess.py", line 64, in maybeCallProcessEnded
    proto.processEnded(Failure(reason))
  File "/usr/share/alot/alot/helper.py", line 352, in processEnded
    self.deferred.callback(out)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/twisted/internet/defer.py", line 393, in callback
    self._startRunCallbacks(result)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/twisted/internet/defer.py", line 501, in _startRunCallbacks
    self._runCallbacks()
--- <exception caught here> ---
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/twisted/internet/defer.py", line 588, in _runCallbacks
    current.result = callback(current.result, *args, **kw)
  File "/usr/share/alot/alot/commands/envelope.py", line 252, in afterwards
    ui.dbman.add_message(path, account.sent_tags + initial_tags)
  File "/usr/share/alot/alot/db/manager.py", line 428, in add_message
    raise DatabaseError(msg)
alot.db.errors.DatabaseError: message path /home/samantha/eMail/Outbox/new/1501076831.M362598P14326Q1.queersorceress.email:2,S  is not below notmuchs root path (/home/samantha/eMail/Inbox/)

pazz commented 7 years ago

right: So the fact that this does not show up in the logfile should be a bug.

What happens here is that alot tries to index the newly send mail after sending, which fails because notmuch does not know about that folder.

Please make sure that your draft-mailbox is below the notmuch database root directory: check notmuch config get database.path..

samdmarshall commented 7 years ago

the result of that command is: /home/samantha/eMail/Inbox/, i don't want a draft or outgoing email to be indexed against my inbox database, which is why they are not under the /Inbox/ directory. Alot does the correct thing when writing out draft and outgoing emails. If i were to change that, then those emails could be incorrectly categorized by my tagging rules.

pazz commented 7 years ago

I'm not sure about your tagging rules, but most people would index all their mails, including the ones they sent themselves (otherwise threads wont show your replies for instance).

Remember that in notmuch, the "inbox" tag is completely independent of where the mail file lives, so you don't need separate notmuch databases for incoming and outgoing mails. Your tagging script could add the "inbox" tag only to mails in the Inbox directory for example, and you then simply search you database for "tag:inbox" to get that view on it.

All of this is independent of the bug here: of course alot should properly report this exception. I do think however, that a warning is appropriate, because most people will want to index their outbox and might have misconfigured notmuch.

samdmarshall commented 7 years ago

that is fair; i don't want that because of my unique tagging rules. I just want to not have this exception dumped to screen each time i send an email :)

pazz commented 6 years ago

would you mind checking if this is still an issue on current master? I mean that this exception appears in the logs but does not trigger a notification? We've been restructuring alot to use asyncio instead of twisted's deferreds, so your issue might have been solved accidentally in the process.. thanks!