ssl problems

ssl problems

[Eric Abrahamsen]

I recently updated from debian lenny to squeeze, and have found that
connecting to gmail's pop servers via ssl has become extremely dicey. I
have four email addresses, all of them gmail, and on any given mail
check three of them will tell me "POP SSL connexion failed". It can be
very hard to get all my email. My emacs/gnus versions and setup did not
change (still emacs 23.3.1 and gnus 5.13), all that changed was my linux
installation. I'm accessing gmail on port 995 with ":ssl t", and I have
"starttls-use-gnutls" set to true. My gnutls version is 2.8.6, which I
see isn't the latest version, but 2.10 isn't in the debian repos and
besides this was working smoothly under lenny, which presumably had the
same gnutls version.

Is there anything I can do to further debug this? I'm not an expert with
using gnutls-cli from the command line, but so far as I can tell it
connects fine (gnus only fails *most* of the time, anyway…). Is there a
way to get gnus to tell me *why* the POP SSL connection failed?

Thanks,
Eric

Re: ssl problems

[Tim Landscheidt]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:

> I recently updated from debian lenny to squeeze, and have found that
> connecting to gmail's pop servers via ssl has become extremely dicey. I
> have four email addresses, all of them gmail, and on any given mail
> check three of them will tell me "POP SSL connexion failed". It can be
> very hard to get all my email. My emacs/gnus versions and setup did not
> change (still emacs 23.3.1 and gnus 5.13), all that changed was my linux
> installation. I'm accessing gmail on port 995 with ":ssl t", and I have
> "starttls-use-gnutls" set to true. My gnutls version is 2.8.6, which I
> see isn't the latest version, but 2.10 isn't in the debian repos and
> besides this was working smoothly under lenny, which presumably had the
> same gnutls version.

> Is there anything I can do to further debug this? I'm not an expert with
> using gnutls-cli from the command line, but so far as I can tell it
> connects fine (gnus only fails *most* of the time, anyway…). Is there a
> way to get gnus to tell me *why* the POP SSL connection failed?

For me, it helped to increase nnheader-read-timeout (and
pop3-read-timeout to be on the safe side) to 2.0.

  Unfortunately, the whole SSL shebang with separate pro-
cesses, not to speak of two different clients, seems to be
*very* fragile. It would be *really* nice if it could be
included properly in Emacs.

Tim

Re: ssl problems

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:28:06 +0000 Tim Landscheidt <tim@tim-landscheidt.de> wrote: 

TL>   Unfortunately, the whole SSL shebang with separate pro-
TL> cesses, not to speak of two different clients, seems to be
TL> *very* fragile. It would be *really* nice if it could be
TL> included properly in Emacs.

Agreed; see
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/119938/focus=119990 
("Emacs core TLS support").

Ted

Re: ssl problems

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Tim Landscheidt <tim@tim-landscheidt.de> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>
>> I recently updated from debian lenny to squeeze, and have found that
>> connecting to gmail's pop servers via ssl has become extremely dicey. I
>> have four email addresses, all of them gmail, and on any given mail
>> check three of them will tell me "POP SSL connexion failed". It can be
>> very hard to get all my email. My emacs/gnus versions and setup did not
>> change (still emacs 23.3.1 and gnus 5.13), all that changed was my linux
>> installation. I'm accessing gmail on port 995 with ":ssl t", and I have
>> "starttls-use-gnutls" set to true. My gnutls version is 2.8.6, which I
>> see isn't the latest version, but 2.10 isn't in the debian repos and
>> besides this was working smoothly under lenny, which presumably had the
>> same gnutls version.
>
>> Is there anything I can do to further debug this? I'm not an expert with
>> using gnutls-cli from the command line, but so far as I can tell it
>> connects fine (gnus only fails *most* of the time, anyway…). Is there a
>> way to get gnus to tell me *why* the POP SSL connection failed?
>
> For me, it helped to increase nnheader-read-timeout (and
> pop3-read-timeout to be on the safe side) to 2.0.

That seems to have done the trick, thanks very much! (I've got no
pop3-read-timeout that I can see, incidentally)

>   Unfortunately, the whole SSL shebang with separate pro-
> cesses, not to speak of two different clients, seems to be
> *very* fragile. It would be *really* nice if it could be
> included properly in Emacs.

I've considered several times just using external tools for the whole
mail-fetching process altogether, though that might no longer be worth
it if things develop as indicated in Ted's link…

>
> Tim

Re: ssl problems

[Tim Landscheidt]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:

> [...]
>>   Unfortunately, the whole SSL shebang with separate pro-
>> cesses, not to speak of two different clients, seems to be
>> *very* fragile. It would be *really* nice if it could be
>> included properly in Emacs.

> I've considered several times just using external tools for the whole
> mail-fetching process altogether, though that might no longer be worth
> it if things develop as indicated in Ted's link…

Well, there are lots of other timeouts that can make Gnus
fail or hold up Emacs :-). In the end, I personally avoid
using external tools because they add another level of com-
plexity, and I don't find the thought of losing mail very
comforting :-).

Tim