Re: nnimap hangs on connect plus Garbage:

[Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>]

Mats Lidell <Mats.Lidell@contactor.se> writes:

> When I start gnus it won't connect to the IMAP-server. It times out
> after a while. Trying again gives the same result.
> 
> Fortunately there is a work around. When gnus waits for the connection
> stop it with a few ^G, turn on nnimap-debug, or have it on from the
> start, make *nnimap-debug* visible in a window and restart gnus. (It
> is not enough to just put on nnimap-debug. The buffer must be
> visible.) Then I'll get the connection. This seems like a rather odd
> race situation when Emacs seems to be to fast and needs to be slowed
> down. But then again there might just be some other problem.

I've seen similar things (any Emacs 20 on AIX 4.[23]), and my
workaround has been to put

(debug-on-entry 'imap-kerberos4-open)

in my .gnus, and press 'c' directly when I see the debug window.  I
suspect the problem might apply to all external connection methods
(SSL, STARTTLS, GSSAPI, etc), but I've only seen it under AIX though.

What OS are you using?

Also, my experience is that if I don't use the workaround, Emacs locks
up completely (any number of C-g doesn't help).  I think it's a race
condition in Emacs process I/O.  I'm hoping that some emacs I/O guru
discover the same problem and fix it. :)

Your workaround probably causes enough delay after opening the
connection until something is read/written to make things work, just
as my workaround.  Perhaps imap.el could `sit-for' a second or so
after opening external processes.  Hm.

> The other problem is that I get an occasional "Garbage:" written in
> the message log when Gnus is splitting the messages into folders. It
> is just to start gnus again and the splitting continues, as it seems,
> from where it stopped. I'm not aware of any problem, like lost mail,
> due to this problem.

This may also be due using a external program, sometimes control
characters and stuff is inserted.  In these cases, please enable
`imap-log' and search it for whatever is printed in the "Garbage: "
message.  Things to look out for may also be long lines, sometimes
external programs have fixed size line buffers which gets overwritten
corrupting the IMAP commands.

If you don't use a external access method, I've no idea what would
cause this.