Re: IMAP servers that don't offer SEARCH

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Matthias Andree <ma@dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de> writes:

> I have an upstream IMAP server that doesn't support the "SEARCH" command
> (replies BAD). Is there any chance to have nnimap.el operate when
> imap-search cannot be used?

If the server doesn't support the SEARCH command, it isn't an IMAP
server by definition, so the best would be to try to get it fixed.  It
would probably be possible to make nnimap work fairly well against
such a server, but flags would not be synchronized well since nnimap
uses the SEARCH command to figure out which flags it must update in
Gnus' data structures.  It probably won't work without modifying
nnimap.el though -- although the modifications probably aren't major;
most of the imap-search calls can either be removed (e.g.,
n-request-update-info-internal) or modified to return some useful
default (e.g., n-retrieve-which-headers).