Re: Gnus sometimes reports new messages but not showing them on IMAP server

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Greg Troxel <gdt@lexort.com> writes:

> Arash Esbati <arash@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> I've focused on figuring out why the active number goes wrong, but in
>>> the interest of pragmatism it might be better just to make sure that
>>> nnimap always does the equivalent of "M-g" at Gnus startup.
>>
>> That might be a good compromise.
>
> Agreed.  It seems obvious (said knowing that's dangerous) that on
> starting up the program, it's best not to rely on state that could be
> wrong.   That's tricky, because mail programs keep messages and don't
> refetch them, but relying on counts of unread seems very trouble prone,
> vs "I have this message body and the timestamp matches so I won't fetch
> it."
>
> I think it would also be good to separate
>
>    check for new
>
>    get all the messages that are there
>
>    really rescan and don't believe state
>
> in terms of being much louder about the differences.  I have the
> impression that the assembled gnususers here are at least somewhat hazy
> on those boundaries.  At least I am.

I think this is an artifact of Gnus starting out as a newsreader, and
adding email capability later. In a NNTP context, the read/unread
message count is entirely private to your local machine, and something
you can manipulate at will. In an IMAP context, it's very much a part of
multi-machine state. Gnus should always defer to the remote server,
particularly at start up. I do wish I knew where the bug was coming
from, though.