I recently manually upgraded from SM 2.46 to SM 2.48 by performing a full 2.46
uninstall and then installing the new 2.48. Everything works completely fine
as before when I do all my SM upgrades completely manually by first fully
uninstalling the previous version. However, I noticed a problem with the mail
client section whereby one of my accounts has a PHANTOM account icon appearing
above it and it is not really an actual mail account. Meanwhile, all the mail
filters I have created for an actual real mail account directly below the
phantom account icon, now fails to work, even though otherwise that mail
account works normally. I have some mail filters on the account which moves
INBOX mails to another account in the mail client and when incoming mail fits
the criteria of the mail filters and it tries to perform a move action, it
says that the INBOX of the account is missing and then fails to move the
e-mails and leaves them in the account after move failure. I'm wondering if
anyone else has had such a phantom account icon appear in the mail client
after 2.48 upgrade. I'm currently pondering whether this problem is caused by
the mail filter's logic / action which triggered a new SM mail client bug that
previously didn't exist until 2.48, or simply deleting the mail filters and
recreating them will solve the problem.
I would prefer not to have to move the entire mail accounts e-mail files off
to a temporary folder, delete the entire mail account and then move them back
in to see if the problem will resolve and the phantom account icon disappear.
I can't delete the phantom account either and it appears to be a ghost of the
real account directly below it. I have made a screen capture of this problem
and attached it to this post. For privacy reasons, the details of all the real
mail accounts and newsgroups have been blurred out. However, the phantom mail
account on which the highlight bar is located on, is shown. Only an icon is
show with no annotation on this phantom mail account.
<Couple of hours later>
After wasting a couple of hours trying to resolve this problem in SM 2.48 mail
client, I have reverted to version 2.46. This is probably the worst SM mail
client problem I have encountered to date. All previous version upgraded
manually without problems. When in 2.48, I tried to delete the real e-mail
account directly below the phantom account and that did remove the phantom
account. So I thought that the problem was solved. I then recreated the e-mail
account in 2.48 and the phantom account did not appear above it. However,
because my e-mail files for that particular account reside on a folder that is
different from the default mail folder that the mail client uses, I would
change the mail folder path for that account. I then discovered that after
updating this parameter and when SM restarts, the phantom mail account icon
reappeared. Very frustrating.
Furthermore, what's more disturbing is that in the process of deleting the
account and re-creating it, the mail client appears to lose track of and get
confused about which account was deleted, and in fact some other real e-mail
accounts above the phantom account disappeared, even though strangely, when
examining the MAIL AND NEWSGROUP ACCOUNT SETTINGS window, all mail accounts
are still present even though some are NOT displayed in the mail client
itself, therefore there was no way to access the contents of the mail account.
In summary, it appears the phantom mail account icon displayed in the mail
client arises from some confusion of the mail client's tracking of accounts
and their associated mail folder locations. It appears that as soon as a mail
account's file path is updated to the non-default file path, the phantom mail
account appears in the mail client. The reason why I suspect this is related
to the cause of this new bug in SM 2.48 mail client, is because all MAIL
FILTER management window completely loses track of all the available mail
accounts and mail folders, and all existing mail filter rules for the mail
account that is displayed immediately below the phantom mail account, becomes
unavailable to the mail client.
Furthermore, when a mail account is deleted, sometimes the phantom mail
account does not disappear and the phantom account then "plagues" the next
available real mail account below it, and causes the same problem. This issue
and associated problems essentially renders the SM 2.48 mail client risky and
completely unuseable for me. I have over 10 e-mail accounts managed by the
mail client plus half a dozen newsgroups and it's unacceptable that potential
loss of an account can occur because the mail client gets confused about which
account is located where or gets accounts mixed up when deleting accounts and
creating them. I've been forced to go back to SM 2.46 which is completely
stable as far as the mail client goes. This is the very first time I've ever
had any mail client problems doing fully manual upgrades by first uninstalling
the old version and then installing the new version from scratch.
I'm not sure if this issue only occurs with large number of e-mail accounts
managed by the mail client. But the issues of the phantom account is very
unsettling to use SM 2.48. If any other users have these symptoms with SM 2.48
mail client, I would be very interested to hear of your experience.
