Thursday, October 18, 2012

Folder empty in HORDE / IMP, but folder has content

Horde / IMP Empty Mailbox

I have been using the Horde groupware suite for many years now, and cannot remember ever having any problems other than minor issues in connection with upgrades of either Horde itself or the OS on the machine where Horde is installed.
A couple of days ago, however, all of a sudden my inbox displayed the following message, even though there were plenty of messages both read and unread in the folder:
There are no messages in this mailbox.
The funny thing was, I could see all of the messages in the folder if I did a search for a string that was not found - for example search for messages in inbox from "nosuchuser".
Some searching revealed that others have occassionally seen a similar problem, and there seemed to be a connection to the IMP preferences for the user having the problem. The most common recommended solution was to delete all of the imp preferences for the user.

Since I have a lot of customized settings, I wanted to avoid that if possible, so I went digging. I tracked the problem down to a garbled setting in the sortpref preference setting.
The solution for me was to reset sortpref to its' default setting. I did this with the following SQL code:

update horde_prefs set pref_value='a:0:{}' where pref_uid='USERNAME' and pref_name='sortpref' and pref_scope='imp';

(Of course, you have to replace USERNAME with the actual username of the user having the problem)

After logging out and back in again, the problem was fixed.

Originally written: 2011-03-28

Origin from here: http://tips.negaard.net/info/HordePrefs.html

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

DOS memory problems under Windows XP

If you are one those (un)happy people to still having to use DOS applications under Windows XP, then it is possible that your applications no longer run.

If you used high memory then this won't work any longer and you will receive out of memory messages from the DOS application.

The reason for this are a few recent microsoft updates for windows XP.

In more detail,
deinstall these 4 updates and restart the computer

kb2749655
kb2756822
kb2661254-v2
kb2724197

You will then have back the high memory area for your DOS applications.
Why they deactivate high memory is not clear, but I think it's (realy, realy) time to replace your DOS application (and Windows XP at the same time) by a modern solution.