I spent all night last night and all day today importing several months worth of email from the mysql backend of dbmail into the sqlite backend of dbmail using Claws-mail to import mbox files over IMAP. I have been unable to use fetchmail to load new mail, and unable to browse existing mail. the dbmail-lmtp daemon that receives it from fatchmail sporadically complains that "the (sqlite) database is locked". shouldn't this be able to do two things at once? I didn't have this problem with MySQL.

To make matters worse, the IMAP performance of jsut browsing mail has slowed intolerably. Apparently, sqlite3 can't handle a GB database of email messages as well as Mysql can.

*wince*

I guess it's time to figure out how to migrate back to Mysql.

I also recall never seeing the corruption/header mangling problem on the Mysql backend either. I've even developed a theory about how it happens. It always only pops up when there are single quotes in the message header, and the symptom is that the header message block, as stored in the database is missing it's trailing characters. sometimes they're just missing the ending carriage returns; sometimes they're actually missing trailing characters on the final header line as well.

Could it be that dbmail is properly escaping single quotes in preparation for insertion into the database, by adding backslash characters as customary, but the forgetting to account for the extra length those escaping characters add to the header string? If the escaped string isn't the same length, but the length isn't updated, it might be chopping off the characters at the string's end by mistake.

When I finally get my email back to where I want (if ever), I may file a bug report with dbmail. but fuck this.