with local imap: sent mail (Gcc) sometimes not saved

with local imap: sent mail (Gcc) sometimes not saved

[Christoph Groth]

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Hi,  I’m using Gnus (from Emacs 24.4.1) with a local dovecot and 
mbsync for synchronizing to remote IMAP servers [1].   This works 
really rather well.  There is, however, one problem:  I set the 
gcc-self Gnus parameter to save all outgoing mail.  Usually this 
works flawlessly, but from time to time I cannot find some message 
that I know that was sent out successfully (I can see it in my 
msmtp log, and I also already got replies to such messages).  Do 
you have any suggestions how to debug this?  I noticed that 
dovecot, when used directly through the /usr/lib/dovecot/imap 
executable, does not seem to log anything.  I tried to add the 
command line parameter 
 
 -o log_path=/home/myuser/.dovecot.log 
 
but nothing gets logged there.

For now, I've added "2>>$HOME/.dovecot.err" to the end of
nnimap-shell-program.  Nothing has appeared there so far, so I'm not too
confident to be able to catch the problem in this way.  Also, I'm not
even sure whether it's a dovecot problem at all.  It could be also due
to Gnus itself.

It's disquieting to randomly and quietly loose mail.  I'd love to fix this.

Christoph


[1] http://roland.entierement.nu/blog/2010/09/08/gnus-dovecot-offlineimap-search-a-howto.html

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Couldn't store article in group

[Christoph Groth]

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Hi,

I've been able to narrow down my problem quite a bit: Messages do
not get stored whenever the subject contains non-ASCII characters,
e.g. the UTF opening quote character (“) or accented characters.

In *Messages* the following line appears:
Couldn't store article in group nnimap+cwg:2014: ((BAD Error in IMAP command APPEND: Invalid arguments.))

The email, however, is sent correctly.  It’s only the storing that
fails.

Any ideas on how to debug this further?

Christoph

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Re: Couldn't store article in group

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Christoph Groth <christoph@grothesque.org> writes:

> I've been able to narrow down my problem quite a bit: Messages do
> not get stored whenever the subject contains non-ASCII characters,
> e.g. the UTF opening quote character (“) or accented characters.
>
> In *Messages* the following line appears:
> Couldn't store article in group nnimap+cwg:2014: ((BAD Error in IMAP
> command APPEND: Invalid arguments.))
>
> The email, however, is sent correctly.  It’s only the storing that
> fails.
>
> Any ideas on how to debug this further?

Try setting `nnimap-record-commands' and look in the *imap log* buffer
after one of these errors.  That will tell us what commands nnimap is
sending to the server.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/

Re: Couldn't store article in group

[Christoph Groth]

Thank you, Lars, for your interest.  Now that I live in France 
this particular issue can be quite annoying...

Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:

> Christoph Groth <christoph@grothesque.org> writes:
>
>> I've been able to narrow down my problem quite a bit: Messages 
>> do
>> not get stored whenever the subject contains non-ASCII 
>> characters,
>> e.g. the UTF opening quote character (“) or accented 
>> characters.
>>
>> In *Messages* the following line appears:
>> Couldn't store article in group nnimap+cwg:2014: ((BAD Error in 
>> IMAP
>> command APPEND: Invalid arguments.))
>>
>> The email, however, is sent correctly.  It’s only the storing 
>> that
>> fails.
>>
>> Any ideas on how to debug this further?
>
> Try setting `nnimap-record-commands' and look in the *imap log* 
> buffer
> after one of these errors.  That will tell us what commands 
> nnimap is
> sending to the server.

I tried, this is what gets added to *imap log* when a message 
fails to be stored:

22:59:56 [cwg] 597 SELECT "2015"
22:59:57 [cwg] 598 APPEND "2015" {1372}

At the same time the following appears in *Messages*:

Couldn't store article in group nnimap+cwg:2015: ((BAD Error in 
IMAP command APPEND: Invalid arguments.))

On the other hand, when a message is stored without problems, the 
following
gets added to *imap log*:

22:56:14 [cwg] 496 SELECT "2015"
22:56:14 [cwg] 497 APPEND "2015" {1381}
22:56:14 [cwg] 498 SELECT "2015"
22:56:14 [cwg] 499 UID FETCH 1:* FLAGS
22:56:14 [cwg] 500 SELECT "2015"
22:56:14 [cwg] 501 UID STORE 177 +FLAGS.SILENT (\Seen)

Not sure whether this is of much help.  Please let me know if you 
have
other ideas.

Another observation:
I noticed the problem only ever with subjects that contain 
non-ASCII characters.
It can be reproduced with certain subjects (e.g. "C’est déjà 
tard").  On the
other hand, some subjects (e.g. "déjà vu") do not seem to trigger 
the error.

Christoph

Re: Couldn't store article in group

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Christoph Groth <christoph@grothesque.org> writes:

> 22:59:56 [cwg] 597 SELECT "2015"
> 22:59:57 [cwg] 598 APPEND "2015" {1372}
>
> At the same time the following appears in *Messages*:
>
> Couldn't store article in group nnimap+cwg:2015: ((BAD Error in IMAP
> command APPEND: Invalid arguments.))

So it really is reacting to the contents of the message itself (which
follows the APPEND command, but isn't logged here).

> Another observation:
> I noticed the problem only ever with subjects that contain non-ASCII
> characters.
> It can be reproduced with certain subjects (e.g. "C’est déjà tard").
> On the
> other hand, some subjects (e.g. "déjà vu") do not seem to trigger the
> error.

That's even weirder.

Does this only happen with the Subject header?  What if the From header
or the body contains these characters?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/

Re: Couldn't store article in group

[Alan Schmitt]

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On 2015-01-27 11:50, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

>> Another observation:
>> I noticed the problem only ever with subjects that contain non-ASCII
>> characters.
>> It can be reproduced with certain subjects (e.g. "C’est déjà tard").
>> On the
>> other hand, some subjects (e.g. "déjà vu") do not seem to trigger the
>> error.
>
> That's even weirder.
>
> Does this only happen with the Subject header?  What if the From header
> or the body contains these characters?

The apostrophe ’ may not be latin1, whereas the other characters are.

Alan

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Re: Couldn't store article in group

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org> writes:

> The apostrophe ’ may not be latin1, whereas the other characters are.

Aha.  So the server is rejecting all non-latin1 characters?

Or perhaps nnimap is encoding stuff in a wonky way.  Could you use
wireshark or something to capture what's actually sent?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/