No indication of what's wrong with logging in to IMAP server

No indication of what's wrong with logging in to IMAP server

[Kai Großjohann]

With a system upgrade, my Cyrus saslpasswd entry got b0rked and I
couldn't log in.  (I have an entry in ~/.authinfo for the IMAP
server.)  When I started Gnus, I got no indication of what was the
error: Gnus kept trying to contact the IMAP server and Emacs appeared
hung.  So I typed C-g to wake up Emacs, and then it continued and
showed me all nnimap groups with `*' in front.  But I couldn't see any
message in the echo area that said that the IMAP server refused login
and why.

kai
-- 
~/.signature: No such file or directory

Re: No indication of what's wrong with logging in to IMAP server

[Matt Christian]

Hi Kai & other Gnusers,

> With a system upgrade, my Cyrus saslpasswd entry got b0rked and I
> couldn't log in.  (I have an entry in ~/.authinfo for the IMAP
> server.)

Unfortunately I don't have a remedy for the problem you're describing
but I'd like to make a point by pointing out that this type of problem
is not strictly related to hung IMAP servers.

>  When I started Gnus, I got no indication of what was the
> error: Gnus kept trying to contact the IMAP server and Emacs appeared
> hung. 

The same thing will happen if Gnus tries to open a NNTP server that you
can't reach for some reason (network/host down, etc).  Remember when
Andover.net suffered a major outage of their popular servers
(slashdot.org, freshmeat.net, others) a little while ago?  Well, I had
news.freshmeat.net setup as a secondary server in Gnus.  Because that
NNTP server was unreachable, Gnus hung at startup with very little
indication of what was going on.

> So I typed C-g to wake up Emacs, and then it continued and
> showed me all nnimap groups with `*' in front.  But I couldn't see any
> message in the echo area that said that the IMAP server refused login
> and why.

My situation above was worse, since hitting C-g would totally cancel
Gnus startup.  I had to do M-x gnus-no-server to open my primary server
(nnml).  For a temporary workaround, I put the following in my .gnus.el:

;;; Prevent Gnus from trying to open problem news servers at startup
;;; Use when a news server is acting up (down, slow, etc)
(add-to-list 'gnus-opened-servers 
  '((nntp "news.freshmeat.net") denied))

Of course, when the news.freshmeat.net NNTP server became reachable,
I commented out the above .gnus.el snippet and all was happy again.

Is this "hung server breaks Gnus startup" a (X)Emacs or a Gnus problem?

I seem to remember that the nntp-connection-timeout variable doesn't
seem to work, does anyone know if that is the cause?  Is there a fix?


- Matt

-- 
Matt Christian - mattc@visi.com
http://www.visi.com/~mattc/
ftp://ftp.visi.com/users/mattc/
Learn to love and love to learn.