Don't retry failing uploads indefinitely

[muessjoeh]

Every 3 months or so I have a problem accessing my web.de account: When I activate the directory list (in German 'Ordnerliste'), I see that ever folder has an error message (the beginning is 'SSLException: Write error:'; how can I see the rest?). From now on, fetching the mails is approximately 10x slower, and storing changed mails (e.g. with a changed read status) is not working at all. The only solution that I know of is a fresh install, what of course repeats every 3 months.

[chrisgee]

I may be having the same issue as described here. Sent messages are not stored on the server (although they are shown in the local sent folder). Read status is not updated, etc.

Therefore I attach a log here.
k9-log.txt

Environment

K-9 Mail version:
version used is com.fsck.k9 version 5.600 as installed by f-droid.

Android version:
7.1.2

Account type (IMAP, POP3, WebDAV/Exchange):
IMAP account

Please let me know if more information is needed

[cketti]

@chrisgee: Thanks for the log. The message being uploaded is quite large. Chances are the server is closing the connection because it considers the message too large. Or maybe the quota is exceeded.
Unfortunately, K-9 Mail considers this to be a temporary error and will try to upload the message over and over again. All other command wait in the queue until the upload command succeeds (or fails permanently; which, in this case, it never does). That explains why the read status is never updated.

[chrisgee]

Thanks for the info. I guess this should be considered a bug, namely that the failing task breaks a lot of other functionality. Bzw, it's not my quota. Any way to recovery without reinstalling and deleting all the not uploaded messages? Thanks, Christoph Am 29. Juni 2019 18:03:57 MESZ schrieb cketti <notifications@github.com>:

…

@chrisgee: Thanks for the log. The message being uploaded is quite large. Chances are the server is closing the connection because it considers the message too large. Or maybe the quota is exceeded. Unfortunately, K-9 Mail considers this to be a temporary error and will try to upload the message over and over again. All other command wait in the queue until the upload command succeeds (or fails permanently; which, in this case, it never does). That explains why the read status is never updated. -- You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #3986 (comment)

-- Christoph Gohle

[cketti]

It's unclear how this situation should be handled best. A connection could be closed at any time without it being a permanent error.
We could count the number of upload attempts and stop trying automatically after a certain amount of attempts. We already do this for send failures.

[muessjoeh]

How is this handled now?
Are there any hints WHY this is happening every now and then?

[chrisgee]

I am quite ignorant with respect to what is going on in K9 internally.
But I imagine the following:

If there is a list of commands to the server to be processed, wouldn't
it make sense to just go through the list one by one (if there is no
specific order required) and keep failed commands in queue until the
next attempt.
Also it would be very helpful if repeated failures would be reported to
the user so that he may take a custom action on those?
Like this commands without repeated failure could be processed and would
not be blocked in the mean time...?

Just an idea...

[muessjoeh]

... but it sounds like a good one.