Re: Gnus sometimes fails to see a message that is actually in IMAP

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Greg Troxel <gdt@lexort.com> writes:

Wow, this is a ton of information! Thanks for all the background. Kudos
on using TLS on your own machine, something I have never had the
patience to set up.

> I have changed the subject, as I am not at all sure that my problem is
> the same as "reports new messages but not showing them on IMAP server".
> In my case, it seems to me as if there is a filter between gnus and the
> IMAP server that redacts a message.
>
>
> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> I was going to say, the IMAP implementation of Outlook is indeed bad!
>> But that's "good" that you're hitting this issue with Dovecot running
>> locally, as that's a setup with fewer confounding variables, and also
>> what I run, so maybe we stand a better chance of reproducing.
>
> Yes, it does seem more tractable.
>
> One thing I find troublesome about modern gnus is that it is part of
> emacs.  I'm currently running 28.2, so that's the gnus I have.  Years
> before, when gnus was in a separate repo, I was running up-to-date gnus
> with stable emacs.   If I'm confused and we should be debugging gnus
> trunk please let me know.

Not confused, of course, but I do think that Emacs 28 is a little bit
too old for this sort of debugging. Ideally we'd be doing it on master,
though 29 is still worthwhile, if you can update to that. There are good
things in the past couple of versions.


[...]

> It would also be interesting to have a gnus-imap-revalidate function that
> for all cached information, fetches it and compares, complaining loudly
> if different.  I have used this technique when debugging routing code to
> end up with only correct cached information, and didn't think of any
> other way to find rare bugs.

This is a really good idea. There's been talk on this list of forcibly
resetting Gnus to the remote server's state at start-up, which would be
something of a band-aid, but this would stand us a better chance of
pinning down the bug. People could run it at Gnus startup and shutdown,
as well as on-demand. I'll look into putting this together.