imap gmail mailboxes followup

imap gmail mailboxes followup

[Eric Abrahamsen]

This is actually a followup to an earlier message, but suddenly I'm only
able to get the most recent 20 messages or so in this group, and so
can't access the original thread to add to it. Anyway, maybe a new
thread is best.

The problem I'm having is that gmail's builtin mailboxes are mostly not
showing up properly in the server. All the "[Gmail]/Starred" etc boxes
just show up as "[Gmail]", and I can't access them, with the exception
of INBOX and Sent Mail. The reason for this, as I watched
`nnimap-get-groups' in action, is that the return value of the LIST imap
command looks like this:

* LIST (%HasChildren) "/" [Gmail].
* LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Spam.
* LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Starred.
* LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Trash.
* LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Drafts.
* LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" "[Gmail]/Sent Mail".
* LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Important.
* LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" INBOX.
96 OK List completed..

The slash characters are in there as separators, and most of the builtin
mailboxes lose the post-slash part of the string.

So obviously groups which contain the separating slash but are *not*
quoted get reported wrong: ie I'm only able to access [Gmail] (not
really a mailbox), INBOX, and Sent Mail. I'm assuming Sent Mail gets
quoted because there's a space in the pathname.

I'm using gnus/dovecot/mbsync. Both the mbsync and gnus invocations of
dovecot contain the "LAYOUT=fs" clause, which I suspect of messing
things up here. I put that in for no good reason, but if I took it out
I'd probably need to trash this installation and re-sync several tens of
thousands of messages, so hopefully there's a simpler solution.

Is there anything I can do to a) change the separator character (given
that I don't really understand how this works, and whether that might
screw things up further), or b) ensure that all the mailbox names are
quoted? I really don't know if the solution is in gnus, or dovecot, or
mbsync...

Thanks! Here's the output of "tree -d" called within one of my top-level
account directories, in case this helps.

Eric


├── cur
├── [Gmail]
│   ├── cur
│   ├── Drafts
│   │   ├── cur
│   │   ├── new
│   │   └── tmp
│   ├── Important
│   │   ├── cur
│   │   ├── new
│   │   └── tmp
│   ├── new
│   ├── Sent Mail
│   │   ├── cur
│   │   ├── new
│   │   └── tmp
│   ├── Spam
│   │   ├── cur
│   │   ├── new
│   │   └── tmp
│   ├── Starred
│   │   ├── cur
│   │   ├── new
│   │   └── tmp
│   ├── tmp
│   └── Trash
│       ├── cur
│       ├── new
│       └── tmp
├── new
└── tmp

Re: imap gmail mailboxes followup

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> This is actually a followup to an earlier message, but suddenly I'm only
> able to get the most recent 20 messages or so in this group, and so
> can't access the original thread to add to it. Anyway, maybe a new
> thread is best.
>
> The problem I'm having is that gmail's builtin mailboxes are mostly not
> showing up properly in the server. All the "[Gmail]/Starred" etc boxes
> just show up as "[Gmail]", and I can't access them, with the exception
> of INBOX and Sent Mail. The reason for this, as I watched
> `nnimap-get-groups' in action, is that the return value of the LIST imap
> command looks like this:
>
> * LIST (%HasChildren) "/" [Gmail].
> * LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Spam.
> * LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Starred.
> * LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Trash.
> * LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Drafts.
> * LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" "[Gmail]/Sent Mail".
> * LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" [Gmail]/Important.
> * LIST (%HasNoChildren) "/" INBOX.
> 96 OK List completed..

The dovecot people say there's no guarantee of a quoted folder name, so
the above is what I'm meant to expect. There must be something weird in
my setup, then, if no one else is having this problem. I "solved" it by
monkey-patching `nnimap-get-groups' so that it's guaranteed to read the
whole line, but I'd still like to know why it doesn't work out of the
box...

E