From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
To: Perttu Luukko <perttu.luukko@iki.fi>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: How to debug 'ignoring non-mail file' issues
In-Reply-To: <20140831074059.GA13399@rakuuna.dhcp.inet.fi>
References: <20140831074059.GA13399@rakuuna.dhcp.inet.fi>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.18.1+72~g028c560 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/24.3.1
	(x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 07:41:42 -0700
Message-ID: <87tx4ssoux.fsf@maritornes.cs.unb.ca>
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Perttu Luukko <perttu.luukko@iki.fi> writes:


> The vast majority of these ignored mails are not ignored after I
> transfer them with offlineimap to another computer. I can non-ignore
> these files probably by copying the renamed file back to the mail
> server, so this is fixable. Offlineimap shouldn't mess with the file's
> contents, so is there something that can cause notmuch to ignore a file
> based on its name?

The most likely cause is that the files are mboxes, whether intentional
or not.  In particular if they start with a "From " (note the lack of :)
and contain a second "From " at the beginning of a line later in the
file. In this case something like sed can replace the initial 
"From " with "X-Envelope-From: ".

I agree that the error message could be more informative in this case.

d