Re: Serious IMAP problems because Gnus doesn't behave RFC compliant

[Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>]

Elias Oltmanns <eo@nebensachen.de> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> it would appear that Gnus currently by design cannot possibly comply
> with RFC 3501. The problem is that according to RFC 3501 a UID may be
> any 32bit unsigned integer, whereas ELisp only supports 28bit signed
> integers---on my system anyway.

Wasn't the bit size increased recently?  But still, on 32-bit systems it
still isn't the full 32 bits.  On 64-bit systems, though, I believe
elisp integers can hold close to 64-bits.

> This has the rather unpleasant consequence that I can't even open one of
> my IMAP mailboxes in Gnus since messages appear to have negative UIDs
> just because of an integer overflow. So, the question is: What can be
> done about it?

Implement bignum in elisp, translate UIDs to locally maintained lower
article numbers (nn)imap.el (messy!), run a translating IMAP-proxy, or
buy a 64-bit machine. :)

If all UIDs in the mailbox is high, you might solve this by substracting
a fixed value from all UIDs in that mailbox.  I think even this will
also be quite messy to implement.

I think XEmacs supports bignum nowadays?

/Simon