The Eternal Sync Bug

Bug Reports
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42

Hey folks, thanks for all the reports - I really appreciate all of the community help identifying the root cause of this issue. The fix that az42 suggested and built into the mailspring-patcher has officially been merged into the app and is part of the latest release (1.17.1)!

If you upgrade to the new version, you should no longer run into this “eternal mailsync” bug. I do think it’s possible that there are multiple bugs being reported here, but I’m hopeful they shared the same root cause in libetpan.

Thanks for your patience and I appreciate all the contributors with detailed bug reports and research that helped get this across the line.

43

Sorry to report that, but I seem to have this very problem right now with 1.17.2, installed on Ubuntu 22.04 via snap. Mailspring won’t even show the window, just prints a few lines to console and hangs. My email provider is Google.

Console output:

# mailspring
Gtk-Message: 15:48:02.098: Not loading module “atk-bridge”: The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
Running database migrations
App load time: 286ms

{“error”:null}
(node:253901) [DEP0180] DeprecationWarning: fs.Stats constructor is deprecated.
(Use mailspring --trace-deprecation ... to show where the warning was created)
(node:254089) [DEP0180] DeprecationWarning: fs.Stats constructor is deprecated.
(Use exe --trace-deprecation ... to show where the warning was created)
(node:254090) [DEP0180] DeprecationWarning: fs.Stats constructor is deprecated.
(Use exe --trace-deprecation ... to show where the warning was created)

I see quite a few related processes, none of which seems to utilize CPU in a significant way:

huawei    253901    5033  0 15:48 pts/1    00:00:00 /snap/mailspring/574/usr/bin/mailspring --no-sandbox
huawei    253962  253901  0 15:48 pts/1    00:00:00 /snap/mailspring/574/usr/share/mailspring/mailspring --type=zygote --no-zygote-sandbox --no-sandbox
huawei    253963  253901  0 15:48 pts/1    00:00:00 /snap/mailspring/574/usr/share/mailspring/mailspring --type=zygote --no-sandbox
huawei    253978    1248  0 15:48 ?        00:00:00 /snap/mailspring/574/usr/share/mailspring/chrome_crashpad_handler --monitor-self-annotation=ptype=crashpad-handler --no-rate-limit --database=/home/huawei/snap/mailspring/574/.config/Mailspring/Crashpad --url=https://id.getmailspring.com/report-crash?ver=1.17.2&platform=linux --annotation=_companyName=Mailspring --annotation=_productName=Mailspring --annotation=_version=1.17.2 --annotation=lsb-release=Ubuntu Core 24 --annotation=plat=Linux --annotation=prod=Electron --annotation=ver=39.2.7 --initial-client-fd=38 --shared-client-connection
huawei    254021  253962  0 15:48 pts/1    00:00:02 /snap/mailspring/574/usr/share/mailspring/mailspring --type=zygote --no-zygote-sandbox --no-sandbox
huawei    254040  253901  0 15:48 pts/1    00:00:00 /proc/self/exe --type=utility --utility-sub-type=network.mojom.NetworkService --lang=en-US --service-sandbox-type=none --no-sandbox --render-node-override=/dev/dri/renderD128 --crashpad-handler-pid=253978 --enable-crash-reporter=8d3a0528-2aae-4ad7-99ee-524ffa5f5d93,no_channel --user-data-dir=/home/huawei/snap/mailspring/common --shared-files=v8_context_snapshot_data:100 --field-trial-handle=3,i,10281641329238096859,2178088469135116080,262144 --enable-features=PdfUseShowSaveFilePicker --disable-features=LocalNetworkAccessChecks,ScreenAIOCREnabled,SpareRendererForSitePerProcess,TraceSiteInstanceGetProcessCreation --variations-seed-version --trace-process-track-uuid=3190708989122997041
huawei    254136  254090  0 15:48 pts/1    00:00:00 /bin/bash /snap/mailspring/574/usr/share/mailspring/resources/app.asar.unpacked/mailsync --mode sync --info user@email.com
huawei    254139  254136  0 15:48 pts/1    00:00:00 /snap/mailspring/574/usr/share/mailspring/resources/app.asar.unpacked/mailsync.bin --mode sync --info user@email.com

How do I debug that?

Thanks!

UPD: Suddenly a message notification appeared, and after that main window opened, after almost 24 hrs

1 Like
44

I have the same issue on Fedora 42 installed via rpm. Starting mailspring prints some stuff out to console, then hangs forever (or at least until I gave up and started killing things).

~ $ mailspring --version
1.17.2-a312df89
~ $ mailspring
Running database migrations
App load time: 325ms
/usr/share/mailspring/resources/app.asar.unpacked/mailsync.bin: /lib64/libcurl.so.4: no version information available (required by /usr/share/mailspring/resources/app.asar.unpacked/mailsync.bin)

{"error":null}
Manual update check (updates.getmailspring.com/check/linux/x64/1.17.2-a312df89/anonymous/stable) returned 204
(node:8845) [DEP0180] DeprecationWarning: fs.Stats constructor is deprecated.
(Use `mailspring --trace-deprecation ...` to show where the warning was created)
45

I believe the problem I’ve described is exactly the one described in a parallel thread

46

v1.21.1 includes an increased SQLite busy timeout that should reduce sync stalls significantly. Steps to try:

  1. Update to v1.21.1
  2. Preferences > General > Reset Cache to rebuild the local database
  3. Exclude Mailspring from antivirus real-time scanning — antivirus tools scanning SQLite WAL files during writes is a very common cause of stuck syncs
  4. For very large mailboxes (100k+ messages), initial sync genuinely takes many hours — leaving it running overnight often resolves it

For Zoho IMAP specifically: ensure IMAP is enabled in Zoho settings (Settings > Mail Accounts > IMAP Access) and use an app-specific password if MFA is enabled.