kmail 23.04.3 - Duplicating emails on mail server

[stevet1]

Each time Kmail sync’s with the server it creates a duplicate emails within the BT email server.
This resulted in over 4500 copies of one email and over 3,700 of a second email and a total of over 10,000 emails over 2 days which had to be manually deleted from the BT email server

This problem does not occur with the Thunderbird email client or either of my android email clients

I have two BT email accounts so I tested this in two ways.

1 - Deleting one of the accounts from Kmail - No more duplicate emails have been created for this account on the BT server.
2 - Disabling the ‘Enable interval Mail Checking’ option in the second Kmail account setup - Afterwards e-mails are not duplicated on the BT server except when running a manual sync via ‘Check Mail’.

Therefore I think that there is an issue with sync’ing Kmail with the BT server which is somehow causing identical duplicate emails to be created with the same date and time created as the original email.

The only e-mails that are duplicated are those that are received during the current Kmail session.
If the Kmail session is closed down and a new one started the same email is not duplicated again, but the previous duplicates remain visible on the server and any emails received in the new session start being duplicated.

Below is a screenshot of the BT webmail page showing one the duplicated test e-mails

[img]file:///home/stv_t/bt_webmail.png[/img]

[doktor5000]

Hi there, you need to upload the screenshot as an attachment, seems you only pasted the path to your local file there.

Also, what does BT server mean - British Telecom ?

[stevet1]

Hi,
Yes, I was trying to add this screenshot of the BT webmail page and yes, BT is British Telecom.

bt_webmail.png (105.79 KiB) Viewed 3705 times

Some background to the issue:
I use BT Mail as my email provider and connect using IMAP via Kmail.
System details are:
Mageia 9 - Kernel 6.6.37 (64 bit)
KDE Plasma 5.27.10
Kmail 5.23.3 (23.04.3)

I usually have Kmail running in the system tray. About three/four weeks ago while Kmail was syncing to the BT e-mail server all of my e-mails disappeared from the Kmail default inbox folder while I was watching. Unfortunately I cannot remember if any updates had been downloaded prior to this happening.
Most e-mails in sub-folders were still visible, however some of these e-mails were also missing, mostly e-mails received in the last few weeks, this was all in the same Kmail session
All e-mails were still present on the mail server and could be seen on my phone and tablet.

I deleted and recreated the account from Kmail but the problem still persisted.
When setting up the account 'Auto Detect' selects STARTTLS on port 143 but this seems to be causing the issue of the dissappearing emails, if I switch to SSL/TLS on port 993 the emails all appear correctly.

However this which is when the current problem started, with all emails in the inbox now showed up correctly but any e-mails received during the current Kmail session being duplicated on the server each time a 'sync' occurred, as mentioned this resulted in over 10,000 emails in the server inbox in two days.

Syncing is currently turned off to prevent duplicate e-mails being created

Below are the Kmail settings for the account:

Receiving - General Tab

receiving_general.png (64.67 KiB) Viewed 3705 times

Receiving - Advanced Tab

Advanced_receiving.png (139.97 KiB) Viewed 3705 times

[doktor5000]

It's probably better to report something specific like that directly upstream, at https://bugs.kde.org/

Although there are some similar reports present already:
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/kmail-fil ... ils/134308
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283682
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388869
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336058

But ultimately you'd need to use some function to remove duplicates, although I believe kmail has that available out of the box.