Mutt stops showing mail contents

[Kevin J. McCarthy]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:16:23AM +0100, Josef Wolf wrote:
>Mutt starts up as always and works as expected. But after some time, it stops
>to show mail contents. It still shows the sidebar with all existing folders
>and the list of messages in the current folder. But no message bodies or
>attachments are shown at all.

Are these mbox format mailboxes?  When the problem occurs, would you 
mind trying a few things:

* Try to <pipe-message> to less.

* Without exiting mutt, try changing $tmpdir to an existing temporary 
directory in your home dir and see if that changes anything:
   :set tmpdir = "~/tmp"

* See if the mutt process is leaking file descriptors by getting the pid 
and running `lsof -p <pid>`.

>Mutt stops not only to show the contents, but also when replying to a mail
>with quote, I end up in an emacs with nothing but the header. So mutt forgets
>all the mail contents except the header.

Does Mutt even show the attribution header in the reply?

>Changing to a different mail or even to a different folder don't help. The
>only way is to quit mutt and start again. Then it works again for several
>hours or even days, just to eventually stop showing mail contents again.

So, it's able to open the new mailbox, parse it, and display the 
messages in the index, but you can't view a message or its attachments?

>Might this be a problem with the size of my inbox (currently 2.9gB)?

Well, could be, but it would seem like the problem should be immediate 
in that case.

-- 
Kevin J. McCarthy
GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C  5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA
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