Merging e-mailed notes or pasting note content with inline (HTML) images fail 100% of the time with this reproduction

[MvdH 490]

Hi there! 

Besides Evernote being slow as a snail, giving too-many-API-calls errors, reverting to old versions (loosing data),

I've got the following problem.

I many times select 2 to 5 notes (say 25 times a day), and merge them. About half of the merging attempts fails, and it is related to the content of notes. When a group of notes fails, it will never succeed. The outcome is various messages of "Something went wrong to sync", whether I revert or not revert, I loose changes. Also I get delayed pop-ups, sometimes multiple claiming uploads of attachments failed. I also get duplicated notes resulting from this process, causing me time to find out which I dare to delete and which not.

I searched in the forums

I did not find similar problems. Do others use merging, or am I the only one of the 200mio users? Does anybody know any cause or solution or workaround? It started with version 10.58.3 for Windows.  I'm on 1gbit glass up+down, fastest Surface Pro 9 that exists. I suspect they build in some logging/messages for exceptions that went wrong before and cause "silent" loss of data. Since a few days I know have loss of data with messages for me as user.

I'll let it know if I learn more.

Grtz & a smile, 

Mark

 

[gazumped 12,074]

Interesting - I'm still on 10.57 and I merge notes fairly regularly - usually no more than 3 at a time.  AFAIK I have never had a fail...  will let you know what happens after I update. Do you have a solid network connection and lots of free space on your hard drive?  Sounds like this is worth reporting to Support if you're having ongoing issues...

[PinkElephant 8,832]

I‘m on a Mac, 10.58.3 direct, and currently on a punny 25Mbit down / 5 Mbit up DSL line.

Just merged several notes (on total 4 merged notes, build from several others), holding text, pictures, PDFs and web clips.

No issues - just on the pdf and web clip I had some wait, because the opening with (probably) conversion of the notes took maybe 30 seconds. While it lasted (30 seconds), the merge button was greyed out.

[MvdH 490]

5 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Interesting - I'm still on 10.57 and I merge notes fairly regularly - usually no more than 3 at a time.  AFAIK I have never had a fail...  will let you know what happens after I update. Do you have a solid network connection and lots of free space on your hard drive?  Sounds like this is worth reporting to Support if you're having ongoing issues...

I am very curious about your merging experience after installing 10.57. Yes, I'll contact support after I find a little more reproduction info. My suspicion is now leaning towards gmail e-mails beining forwarded to my evernote mailaddress, and then merging those notes together. It seems like soms "unidentied" type of attachments that DO show as a correct image OR sometimes showing as a spinning circle (and in that case the content is lost of that image).

[PinkElephant 8,832]

Hmmm, interesting observation. I don't use Gmail, so I can't try to reproduce it. Will send me some mails from different mail providers, and give merging them a try.

[MvdH 490]

1 minute ago, PinkElephant said:

Hmmm, interesting observation. I don't use Gmail, so I can't try to reproduce it. Will send me some mails from different mail providers, and give merging them a try.

That would be greatly appreciated. Try to add some images as attachments to that teste-mail, and some inline images if you can find the time. Thx in advance, also if you have no time.

[PinkElephant 8,832]

Bingo: 5 Emails, different content, different sources, inline pictures, attachments.

First it worked, then came an error message about can't upload and local copy created, and now it is stalled. I think it choked on something while it merged.

The merged note got stuck in upload. The status bar at the bottom right of the window says this, and it doesn't recover even after some minutes wait.

You can switch to this view by opening the troubleshooting option in the help menu (hold alt/opt before opening the help menu, on Windows maybe ctrl) and select "Toggle note status". It should help to talk to support, because it indicates an actual, ongoing problem with the note.

When I then go to another note, and come back to the merged one, what I notice is that the status bar has returned to normal on the merged note as well.

What is missing in the merged notes are ALL attachments, be them small or large. Files, Pictures, Buttons with links, everything. All are replaced by an attachment symbol with the text "Unknown attachment", which won't open when clicked.

You can use this confirmation from my side when you issue your support ticket.

Edit: In the original mails stored in the EN account, the attachments are there and can be opened. What happens seemingly happens on merging.

[judiep 0]

I'm having a problem with merge fails.  My issues started this weekend. The problems started before I upgraded to 10.58.3.  I updated to 10.58.3 hoping the issue would be resolved, but it is still a problem.

I says a note was "saved" in the upload fail notebook.  But the "saved" note is not normal for some reason.  This is a major pain because I have a lot of notes & I'm trying to merge notes to lower my individual note count.

[Neil Maxfield 155]

Hey all. Great spot, and good detailed thread. I've taken the liberty of adding this thread to a log of bugs and errors within the EN Experts Forum which should help in giving it some focus. 

[MvdH 490]

@PinkElephant  Thx for trying the reproduction, while I was in a very busy period at my work. I created the ticket #3700641 just now, using your steps. Greatly appreciated. The ticketnumber is #3700641

@Neil Maxfield Thx. It is indeed a very clear problem with clear reproduction. On contrary to the other 5 problems I deal with right now with Evernote. But step by step they'll fix them and hopefully never have such bugs again in the future.

@judiep  I feel for you. As a workaround I use my installed Windows PowerToys option to paste text without formatting. Instead of merging, I select all and copy all content, switch to the target note and paste-without-formatting via de Windows PowerToys shortcut. It skips the inline images and thus is succesful. It's a tedious process, however for now it gets the job done for my 100+ notes per day that I merge...........sigh... 

[MvdH 490]

Alternate reproduction of the same problem, I believe: Forward an e-mail via gmail, containing an inline image, to your Evernote e-mail address. Wait until it appears in Evernote. Select all, copy to clipboard. Create a new empty note. Paste the clipboard contents to this new note. The paste now fails, content is lost (at least not appearing in the target not) and a message pops up.:

 

From this moment on all the existing images in the target note are also lost and show a spinning circle:

[Stacey Harmon 1,111]

29 minutes ago, MvdH said:

Alternate reproduction of the same problem, I believe: Forward an e-mail via gmail to your Evernote e-mailaddress. Wait until it appears in Evernote. Select all, copy to clipboard. Create a new empty note. Paste the clipboard contents to this new note. The paste now fails, content is lost (at least not appearing in the target not) and a message pops up.:

 

From this moment on all the existing images in the target note are also lost and show a spinning circle:

I'm experiencing this too – error message, and spinning circle for images on merged notes. Mac v10.58.3. Have submitted my activity log for troubleshooting purposes by support team.

[Guest]

Thank you for raising this issue and for all of the detailed context you all have taken the time to provide. 

I wanted to reach out here and let everyone know that I sent this over to the development team today. We're on it. I'll be in touch individually for anyone that opened support tickets.  

Notably yours, 

Molly 

[MvdH 490]

23 minutes ago, Molly_S said:

Thank you for raising this issue and for all of the detailed context you all have taken the time to provide. 

I wanted to reach out here and let everyone know that I sent this over to the development team today. We're on it. I'll be in touch individually for anyone that opened support tickets.  

Notably yours, 

Molly 

Thank you for this personal approach and keeping lines short and communication open and clear. Very much appreciated! 🙌👊👍 I hope this will be done for more bugs, in an open and collective discussion, not via a million seperate support tickets getting closed too fast, in my experience. Thx a million!

[Guest]

Thank you for the repros!  I reproed both cases:

case 1:

1. email 2 notes with attachments to import email address
2. go to client and merge notes

case 2:

1. select one of those emailed notes
2. select all, copy
3. create new note, paste

In my case I think it's the little company logo in my signature that is causing issues and not the actual image in the note.  So maybe not everyone will be affected.

[MvdH 490]

5 hours ago, RMorgan said:

Thank you for the repros!  I reproed both cases:

case 1:

1. email 2 notes with attachments to import email address
2. go to client and merge notes

case 2:

1. select one of those emailed notes
2. select all, copy
3. create new note, paste

In my case I think it's the little company logo in my signature that is causing issues and not the actual image in the note.  So maybe not everyone will be affected.

I estimate I forward about 50 e-mails per day to evernote, from mainly gmail, but also Outlook. I think >80% of them goe wrong, due to logo's etc. that indeed are in signatures and such that go wrong.

[MvdH 490]

I can confirm this is not fixed in 10.58.5 version, yet. In that version the "half of my note is gone suddenly" bug seems to be fixed. I haven't run into that one for a whole day, where it happens to me about once a day. 

[gazumped 12,074]

Not sure if this is related,  but I have a couple of notes with tables containing images and files where I created two versions of that note - let's use my favourite example "Amazon".  There's one note with the a screen grab of the order details for my 'nuclear disintegrator ray gun' plus the email acknowledgement.  And,  let's say I made another separate note containing the scanned delivery details.  If I search by order number I find both notes and want to combine them.  Both contain 2x4 tables with images and files in one cell and dates / comments in the other.  

If I Ctrl-C copy one table and paste it into the other note,  I get a red error 'copy failed' and while the destination note has the new table in place,  plus the dates and comments,  any files or images are shown as rotating circles.  I've had one of those running for 5 days now and the images still haven't appeared.

Oddly - I made copies of both notes and merged them,  and that worked fine - except the two tables refuse to join up.  There's an annoying empty line between them that can't be deleted.  So in this case - merge good / copy bad.

Since that experience I've had a couple more duplications where I exported any attachments before copying the table across,  then re-added the attachments.  That works too...

[MvdH 490]

5 hours ago, gazumped said:

Not sure if this is related,  ...

nuclear disintegrator ray gun'

About the first part: It sounds related.

On the second part: Go Gazumped! Go! 🎂💉🎊🍾

Finally, I hope the fix this merge/paste bug soon. It is a BIG part of my workflow... 🙂 And they got reproduction delivered on a silver platter.

[bmcl26 578]

I just got back from Holiday and catching up as I did not have the occasion or ability to merge any notes while away. I upgraded to 10.58.5. I have also experienced problems merging notes created in an Import Folder.

[MvdH 490]

6 hours ago, bmcl26 said:

I just got back from Holiday and catching up as I did not have the occasion or ability to merge any notes while away. I upgraded to 10.58.5. I have also experienced problems merging notes created in an Import Folder.

Great to have you back from Holiday. Was it fun? Hope so! Were you able to buy a nuclear disintegrator ray gun?  Sorry... Feeling a bit corny and went waaaay off topic. Will dm next time... 🙏🤗