Troubleshooting mbsyncEdit

Created , updated

Example

I had a sync run failing with the following (debug) output:

propagating new messages
>>> 4133 APPEND "[Gmail]/All Mail" {153284}
+ go ahead
* BYE Invalid character in literal
IMAP error: unexpected BYE response: Invalid character in literal

To make debugging easy, set:

PipelineDepth 1

Run with full debug flags (may produce a lots of output):

mbsync -V -DCmMNs $ACCOUNT_NAME

There only clue as to which message was at fault was the size (153284), so I searched with:

find . -size +145k -and -size -155k

And printed file information with:

find . -size +145k -and -size -155k -exec file {} \;

Sanity checked the sizes with:

find . -size +145k -and -size -155k -exec ls -lS {} \;

But there was no exact size match.

Checked available encodings with:

iconv -l

And then confirmed that all the files that were supposedly ASCII-encoded really were:

find . -size +145k -and -size -155k \
  -exec iconv -f ASCII -t UTF-8 {} \; > /dev/null

Eventually broadened the search and found 3 files of encoding "data". Visually inspected each and determined that they were disposable, so deleted locally and from server too, then the sync worked.

See also