#1237 new
Doug Brouwer

Duplicates in Inbox

Reported by Doug Brouwer | August 18th, 2015 @ 09:26 PM

I'm getting random occurences of duplicates and triplicates in my Inbox. We've checked the mail server and they are not on the mail server. If I look at the same account in Apple Mail they are not there. But the same items are duplicated in MailMate on both Macs that have MailMate. The duplicates have different Msg ID and different UID. Edit->Select Duplicates does find the duplicates, but I'd certainly prefer that the duplicates not be created in the first place.

Is this a known issue? Is there a fix?

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • Conventum

    Conventum August 19th, 2015 @ 07:32 AM

    I've got exactly the same problem. But some messages are selected as duplicates and some are not :(

  • benny

    benny August 19th, 2015 @ 09:54 AM

    It shouldn't happen that a message has a UID if it's not on the server (except if the account is offline and it has been deleted from another email client). I suggest you also enable the “Source Mailbox” column to make sure the messages are in the same mailbox.

    What kind of IMAP server are we dealing with here? Gmail?

    I suggest focusing on a single pair of messages for which you know only 1 should exist. I can then provide instructions to manually connect to the server and verify that only 1 of them exists (but I'll need the server address to make sure I provide the correct instructions).

    Don't worry about “Select Duplicates” since it's irrelevant if MailMate and the server are not properly synched.

    @Conventum: Make sure it's the same problem by checking the UID as Doug did. If it is then you can also follow the instructions above.

  • Conventum

    Conventum August 19th, 2015 @ 11:44 AM

    Hi benny,

    thank you for your fast response. Indeed, my mailbox is Gmail so in Mailmate is a box "INBOX" and "[Gmail] -> Send", "[Gmail] -> Trash" etc. for each Gmail-Account.

    I suggest you also enable the “Source Mailbox” column to make sure the messages are in the same mailbox.

    This shows, that the messages are in "INBOX" and "[Gmail]->Send". But the UIDs of the identical messages are different.

    Would you suggest deleting the INBOX-Folder in Mailmate?

    Best regards,

    conventum

  • benny

    benny August 19th, 2015 @ 12:12 PM

    @Conventum: No, definitely do not do that. It's where your new messages arrive (you probably cannot delete it). If you select “All Messages” then you see emails from all mailboxes including Sent (but not trash/junk). If you select “Inbox” or “INBOX” under SOURCES in the mailbox outline then I would not expect any messages to be shown which are located in Sent. So, which mailbox have you selected when you see these duplicates?

  • Conventum

    Conventum August 19th, 2015 @ 12:17 PM

    Under SOURCES I have selected the main mailbox. Under the main mailbox there is INBOX and [Gmail]...

  • benny

    benny August 19th, 2015 @ 12:20 PM

    Ah, selecting an account under SOURCES shows you all emails within that account. Originally I considered this a feature, but I believe this is not the first time it has confused users. So, you are seeing emails which exist in more than 1 mailbox. This could also be a labelled email due to the non-IMAP like behavior of Gmail.

  • Conventum

    Conventum August 19th, 2015 @ 12:37 PM

    Yes, I think that's the problem. In Gmail I have removed all labels before using Mailmate. But there are fixed labels like "Inbox". Maybe you could fix this special Gmail behavior in Mailmate?

  • benny

    benny August 19th, 2015 @ 12:43 PM

    @Coventum: Well, if you do not subscribe to “[Gmail]/All Mail” and have no labels then no special handling is needed. The duplicates you are seeing should really be duplicates (just in two different mailboxes). It might also be helpful to read this.

    @Doug: Did any of this solve your problem?

  • Conventum
  • Doug Brouwer

    Doug Brouwer August 19th, 2015 @ 04:36 PM

    Hi Benny—

    First, let me say that I am new to MailMate—looking for a replacement to Mail that doesn’t tie up our server with constant downloading of the same IMAP mail to all of our clients multi times a day. I’m very impressed by your immediate and thoughtful response! Thanks!

    We host our own mail server using Dovecot. We’re also using maildir for mail storag. Our system admin has checked the server and the duplicates are definitely not on the server. When I talk about duplicates, I am referring to duplicates in the Inbox of an individual account. I am not looking at the general Inbox folder, but the sub folder Inbox for each account. And as I mentioned before, the duplicates don’t show in Mail if we look at the same Inbox there. If I enable the Source Mailbox column the duplicates are in the same source mailbox.

    I’m tried replying to the email of this thread and attaching a screenshot of this thread in my Inbox. I selected a triplicated mail from conventum. You can also see, by timestamp, another triplicate and a duplicate. I don't see how to include attachments or screenshots in this thread. If you think it might be useful, let me know how to send it.

    Thanks again.

    Doug

  • Doug Brouwer

    Doug Brouwer August 19th, 2015 @ 09:25 PM

    A couple of additional notes:
    Emails are sometimes duplicated more than 2 or 3 times.
    When I forward one of the duplicates, all of them show as having been forwarded.

  • John Orjias

    John Orjias August 19th, 2015 @ 10:12 PM

    Hello, I'm John, Doug's IT guy, as Doug mentioned in his last post the messages are definitely not duplicated on the mail server. I have gone into the file system and verified this (Maildir), also duplicates never show up in mac mail, postbox, usermin webmail, or outlook 2015, so I don't see how it would be any weird server config in dovecot causing mailmate to see duplicates.

    As Doug mentioned if you were to reply to one of the duplicated massages showing in mailmate, mailmate puts the reply icon arrow to the left of all the duplicates, so its seeing them all as the same message and of course if you look at the message source for all the duplicates they all have the same message id, however the two columns in mailmate "msg-id" and "uid" show unique numbers, I have blown away mailmates database and rebuilt it, I have deleted the accounts and put them back in, you name it I have tried it, I have checked everything I can think of in the dovecot config. I just don't understand what I am missing here. Its got to be some weird mailmate issue.

    By the way the reason we are trying your product is this
    MAC Mail is to slow, and just decides to resynce at random times way to often when your dealing with large imap accounts.
    Postbox is WAY WAY WAY to buggy and the search just does not cut it,
    Office just seems to make our workstations sluggish in general and so we are trying to avoid that route.

    Your product seems great, its fast it has good search capabilities, but this duplicate email thing is killing it for us, Please please please help us find a solution to this. Thank you in advance.

  • benny

    benny August 20th, 2015 @ 07:46 AM

    Thanks for the details. It's clearly not the same issue as Conventum and it's not similar to anything I can recall seeing in the past.

    First of all, in order to start over with MailMate one can delete the following folder:

    ~/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/
    

    I'm not sure if that's what you tried, but it's an interesting data point if you see the duplicates problem immediately after adding/synch'ing the account.

    I can certainly see how this looks like a MailMate issue, but the unique UID numbers are confusing. I don't (yet) see how MailMate can make up non-existing UIDs.

    In order to debug I'd like to make the problem as simple as possible. If possible, create a new account with just a few dummy messages and see if this exhibits the problem. If it does, would you consider allowing me to access this account?

    If not then I suggest the following.

    • Start over as described above.
    • Add the problematic account while the machine is offline.
    • Under SOURCES, take all mailboxes explicitly offline (Mailbox ▸ Take Offline) except the INBOX (or a smaller mailbox with the duplicates problem).
    • Open the Activity Viewer in MailMate (⌥⌘0).
    • Take the machine online and let this mailbox synchronize to see the duplicates.
    • Use “Help ▸ Send Server Logs” to send me data of this initial sync.

    Now, the first question is: How many messages does MailMate claim is in this mailbox? How many are really in the mailbox on the server? (Compare with the INBOX under SOURCES.)

    I'm asking because one possibility is that the UIDs are somehow wrongly mapped to messages resulting in a combination of duplicates and missing messages. If this is the case then the counts would still match. (This would be a very serious bug if caused by MailMate!)

    Thanks in advance.

    @Doug: You can use “Help ▸ Send Feedback” to send attachments. I'm currently over limit on the Lighthouse ticket system and currently considering alternatives.

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