Re: How do I interrupt attachment downloading over imap?

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Niklas Morberg <niklas.morberg@axis.com> writes:

> Prerequisites: nnimap backend, latest gnus from cvs.
>
> Sometimes people send me large attachments. When I view
> their message in gnus it will take a long time to download
> the attachment. If, after having selected a message with a
> large attachment, I want to abort the viewing of the message
> pressing `C-g' only interrupts the download temporarily.
> Once I select a different message to view, or exit the
> group, the download is resumed.
>
> On a related note, pressing `R' or `r' in the Summary buffer
> to reply to a message with an attachment will also force the
> (oh so slow) download of the entire attachment, which seems
> a bit unecessary. (This happens if the article is not
> currently selected.)

C-g only aborts Gnus' wait loop, the IMAP data is always received
asynchronously in the background.  Unfortunately, this means once
started you can't abort it.  A quick solution to this would be for
nnimap to only retrieve blocks of say 50kb data in turn, which would
make C-g abort after the current 50kb block finished downloading.  A
slower but better solution would be to make Gnus handle partial
messages, I think it was Wes that described how this can be done with
message/partial but I don't know if it has been implemented.

> Is there a way to:
>
> a) Abort downloading of attachments once started?
> b) Don't download attachments when replying to messages?

Not without implementing those features.