Claws Mail and bad folderlist.xml

[idee]

Long and painful story short, I am recovering from a hard drive crash. Have a clean install (OpenSuSE 12.3, x86_64), and my backup data to bring back. We use Claws Mail. I ran CM once to set up the links in the new /home/me directory. Then I copied the contents of the backup CM data into the new /home/me/.clawsmail folder. It tries to open but says the folderlist.xml is bad and will not start. What can I do to get back up and running? What additional information do you need?


Any help is appreciated.

[malcolmlewis]

Long and painful story short, I am recovering from a hard drive crash. Have a clean install (OpenSuSE 12.3, x86_64), and my backup data to bring back. We use Claws Mail. I ran CM once to set up the links in the new /home/me directory. Then I copied the contents of the backup CM data into the new /home/me/.clawsmail folder. It tries to open but says the folderlist.xml is bad and will not start. What can I do to get back up and running? What additional information do you need?


Any help is appreciated.

Hi
In the backup directory there should be a folderlist.xml.bak file? If so open and see if it's suitable to replace the existing xml file. Else based on the folders present you could try and re-create the xml file...?

For both claws-mail and if you created a Local Mail folder, I always use tar to back them up and transfer the zipped file as my backup.

[gogalthorp]

Be sure of the files ownership

[idee]

Thank you. I will check both. My gut says it might be ownership. That would be the easiest.

[idee]

The easy answer was it. It copied over as root/root. Thank you!

Now for the quirky question. Where is the setting that points to the data folder? We have a dual boot system. I would like to set up Claws in Windoze to point to the same data as Claws in Linux. I don't see anything in preferences or settings.

thanks

[gogalthorp]

If you backup to MS file systems the ownership is not preserved and any permissions are synthetic. So it depends on who is doing the copying and how mounted.

It si best to tar files that are to be backed up since that preserves the ownership. Or use Linux file systems. Note though remember the name is not what is stored it is the UID (userID) so if moving between systems and the owners UID is different on the second system it can lead to the same type problem

[idee]

Thanks.

I duplicated the original account from Linux, on windoze. Basically I just installed the windows version and then copied the internal xml data into it. All of the folder structure, filters, accounts, etc set up correctly. Strangely, the emails weren't there however (perhaps the tar would have fixed this). Ideally I would now like to change the data in windoze and linux to point to a shared fat drive that each would access. The hope is that regardless of which OS was booted, the email data would be the same, not a duplicate, but the same data. Is this possible? I would think it should be if I could modify that pointer.

[malcolmlewis]

On Wed 26 Aug 2015 03:26:01 PM CDT, idee wrote:


Thanks.

I duplicated the original account from Linux, on windoze. Basically I
just installed the windows version and then copied the internal xml data
into it. All of the folder structure, filters, accounts, etc set up
correctly. Strangely, the emails weren't there however (perhaps the tar
would have fixed this). Ideally I would now like to change the data in
windoze and linux to point to a shared fat drive that each would access.
The hope is that regardless of which OS was booted, the email data
would be the same, not a duplicate, but the same data. Is this
possible? I would think it should be if I could modify that pointer.

Hi
Use imap then and let the server retain the mail. Else if want locally,
investigate an exfat [fuse-exfat on linux](? permissions?) or perhaps a
small ext file system (There is a windows driver around, see below) and
share this with windows/linux.

Have a look here http://www.ext2fsd.com/

--
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel
3.12.44-52.10-default If you find this post helpful and are logged into
the web interface, please show your appreciation and click on the star
below... Thanks!

[gogalthorp]

Well Winnows simply does not handle file permission as Linux or Unix does. There is no one to one mapping. So any files coming from Windows is set to what ever the user copying plus the permissions synthesised from the mount. So permissions need to be reset any time copying from one system to another.

[idee]

So permissions need to be reset any time copying from one system to another.

Thanks. To clarify. I don't want to copy the data, creating two locations. I want a single source of the data that the two different user interfaces (Linux and Windoze) are both pointing to. So when either one downloads the mail, both have access to it. Looks like it should be possible if the settings can be accessed to do so, and if they can look at a common partition space (that second part is easy). Does that make sense?