Mutt stops showing mail contents

[Josef Wolf]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 07:39:05AM -0800, Felix Finch wrote:

Thanks for the ideas, Felix!

> * Isn't smartd some kind of error reporting?  I vaguely remember my having
>   some smartd problems years ago, but no details come to mind.  Maybe the
>   informational messages might say something useful.

Yes, smartd is used for monitoring hard drive health. But it also runs
regularly tests and reports the infomrational results.

> * Maybe mutt has filled its memory with enough messages to run into memory
>   limits, although I'd expect a different kind of failure mode.  What does
>   ps or /proc say about mutt's memory usage once it stops showing content?

No idea what would be too much. Currently, there are about 7300 messages in my
inbox and ps(1) reports this:

  raven:/ # ps axl|grep -v grep |egrep  ' (mutt|COMMAND)'
  F   UID   PID  PPID PRI  NI    VSZ   RSS WCHAN  STAT TTY        TIME COMMAND
  0  1000  1135 19716  20   0  97188 21104 SyS_po S+   pts/3      0:00 mutt
  0  1000 15559  6391  20   0  97260 21124 -      S    pts/2      0:00 mutt
  raven:/ #

but currently, the problem does not appear. I'll have to wait until it happens
again.

> * On my mutt, ^o (re-)opens the mail folder in the sidebar.  If you use
>   that, does the problem go away, same as quitting and restarting?

No, it does not go away. This is what I meant when I wrote "changing folders
don't help" in my first post.

The only way I could find is to quit mutt and start it again.

> * I generally do the saem as you, but with tmux instead of screen, and mutt
>   stays up for weeks at a time, although I change sidebar folders many
>   times.  I have two mutt instances running under tnux, one with local
>   maildirs, one with IMAP.

Yes, I'm doing it this way for many years and never had any problems.


-- 
Josef Wolf
jw at raven.inka.de