Re: Gnus Own-Cloudy?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:
>
>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>>
>>> But I would have thought that the active values for each group are
>>> stored on disk, so if you don't copy those over as well, Gnus will get
>>> confused about how many messages are in each group.
>>
>> For accessing an IMAP server, there's no need to sync Gnus data.  That's
>> sort of the point of using IMAP for your mail:  multiple clients can
>> independently access it and stay in sync with each other via the IMAP
>> server.
>>
>> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>>
>>> but as you have a local server on each system, they may be numbering
>>> messages differently depending on how they synchronise with the real
>>> IMAP server.  As a result, the counts and various data structures stored
>>> within the newsrc.eld file may not be consistent between machines?
>>
>> Right.  When you are accessing two different IMAP servers (even if
>> they are synced behind the scenes), you definitely don't want to
>> sync the Gnus data, since article numbers won't match.  For example, if
>> you tick an article in once Gnus instance, a different article may show
>> up as ticked in the other.

[...]

> The UIDs seem to remain the same -- at least my earlier ticked messages
> are the same on both machines. But I'm having another issue with
> something in my mail chain (gmail <-> isync <-> dovecot <-> gnus)
> re-setting UIDs for previously received messages, something that I just
> reported yesterday on the isync mailing list[1].

I've been thinking about this more, and looking at recorded imap
commands. Here's the records for a message that's getting a new UID:

14:00:22 [localhost] 1910 SELECT "INBOX"
14:00:22 [localhost] 1911 UID FETCH 1:* FLAGS
14:00:22 [localhost] 1912 UID FETCH 9975 (UID BODY.PEEK[HEADER])
14:00:22 [localhost] 1913 UID COPY 9975 "INBOX"
14:00:22 [localhost] 1914 UID STORE 9975 +FLAGS.SILENT (\Deleted)
14:00:22 [localhost] 1915 UID EXPUNGE 9975

I have a hunch that's what happening is this:

1. Gnus gets the new message, tries to split it.
2. It doesn't get split, and so falls through to the final default split
   clause, which is "INBOX"
3. Gnus moves the message from INBOX to INBOX, then deletes it (see
   above)
4. The UID EXPUNGE command interacts badly with something else in my
   mail sync chain, and the message is re-created with a new UID.

That's what I'm guessing, anyway! Hopefully I'll get a little closer
tomorrow.

> [1]: http://sourceforge.net/p/isync/mailman/message/33402006/