Re: nnimap check for new mail in the background

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Lars Tobias Børsting <lars.tobias.borsting@ntnu.no> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I have used Gnus for a couple of years now, and can't live without
> it. I have just switched from getting mail via mbox spool to nnimap,
> with CourierIMAP on the server. I have moved my dozens of mail groups
> to nnimap groups. I like IMAP very much, except for one thing; it's very
> slow to check for new mail.
>
> With the nnmail backend, checking some dozens of groups was instant and
> unnoticable. With nnimap, it's painfully slow. That would have been OK
> if I could use Gnus in the meantime. However it locks up, showing
> "nnimap: updating info for folder xxx...done" until it is done. This is
> making me wait for about one minute until I can do something again.

It should not print the "Updating info" messages -- that will be much
slower than regular new mail checking.  It should only say "Quickly
checking mailbox foo", for each nnimap mailbox.

Historically, the reason for the "update info" message was that your
groups' server method (type `G e' on the group in the *Group* buffer)
said (nnimap "foo") rather than "nnimap:foo".  Changing the former
into to the latter would solve the problem.

However, recently (perhaps last month) I have noticed that Gnus CVS
say "Updating info" for me too.  Not always, but sometimes.  So I
think we have another bug.

> Is it possible to do new mail checking in a separate thread that runs in
> the background, so that it doesn't lock up the interface? If not, is it
> hard to implement such a feature?

It should be possible.  Implement something run with the idle timer
and iterate over all groups.  The problem is in informing Gnus about
the update -- there is no clean API to do that.  It could be added,
but I don't know how.

You could also try to fix the bug above, the "Quickly checking" test
is fairly quick.