nnimap hanging when checking mail

nnimap hanging when checking mail

[Nevin Kapur]

Yesterday I moved a rather large hierarchy under IMAP control and every
since then 5 times out 6, when nnimap checks mail, it makes the
connection, then says

nnimap: Checking mailboxes...

and then just hangs.  I've waited for hours but it never returns.  In X,
pressing C-g does nothing and the only remedy is to kill the xemacs
process.  In the terminal, hitting C-g a few times suspends (?) XEmacs,
following which it prompts me to Auto-save, then offers to Abort and
finally dumps core with the attached backtrace.

The trace always seems to hang in process-send-string and the hang is
peculiar to XEmacs, I think because with indentical configuration, I don't
have this problem with Emacs.

Would someone please advise the next course of action? I am totally
crippled right now without use of my beloved Gnus at home.

-Nevin

Re: nnimap hanging when checking mail

[Simon Josefsson]

"Nevin Kapur" <nevin@jhu.edu> writes:

> Yesterday I moved a rather large hierarchy under IMAP control and every
> since then 5 times out 6, when nnimap checks mail, it makes the
> connection, then says
>
> nnimap: Checking mailboxes...
>
> and then just hangs.  I've waited for hours but it never returns.  In X,
> pressing C-g does nothing and the only remedy is to kill the xemacs
> process.  In the terminal, hitting C-g a few times suspends (?) XEmacs,
> following which it prompts me to Auto-save, then offers to Abort and
> finally dumps core with the attached backtrace.
>
> The trace always seems to hang in process-send-string and the hang is
> peculiar to XEmacs, I think because with indentical configuration, I don't
> have this problem with Emacs.
>
> Would someone please advise the next course of action? I am totally
> crippled right now without use of my beloved Gnus at home.

I think reporting it to the XEmacs people, like you did, is the best
way.  It is difficult to debug or solve non-elisp problems in elisp.
Meanwhile, maybe trying Emacs is a workaround.  Frobbing `imap-log'
and looking in *imap-log* might give hints if you want to edebug
{nni,}imap.el further.

Re: nnimap hanging when checking mail

[Nevin Kapur]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> "Nevin Kapur" <nevin@jhu.edu> writes:
>
>> Yesterday I moved a rather large hierarchy under IMAP control and every
>> since then 5 times out 6, when nnimap checks mail, it makes the
>> connection, then says
>>
>> nnimap: Checking mailboxes...
>>
>> and then just hangs.  

> I think reporting it to the XEmacs people, like you did, is the best
> way.  It is difficult to debug or solve non-elisp problems in elisp.
> Meanwhile, maybe trying Emacs is a workaround.  Frobbing `imap-log'
> and looking in *imap-log* might give hints if you want to edebug
> {nni,}imap.el further.

Thanks for the advice.  The problem with debugging is that when XEmacs
hangs, there is nothing more I can seemingly do.  I don't know how to
recover the information in *imap-log* after XEmacs has hung.

Hopefully some XEmacs developer will have some ideas...

-Nevin