Re: nnimap, expiry-target, nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets

[Nevin Kapur <nevin@jhu.edu>]

"Davide G. M. Salvetti" <salve@debian.org> writes:

> I've a problem with the stuff in the subject line.
>

[...]

>   * nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets:
> <======================================================================>
> (setq nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets
>       '(("from" ".*" "nnimap+mail:Mail/Archive/%Y-%m")))
> <======================================================================>
>
> (note that here nnimap+mail is a well working backend).
>
> However, it doesn't work as I expected: when I press "C-c C-x" on the
> group from the *Group* buffer I get the following backtrace:
>
> <======================================================================>
> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)
>   string-match(".*" nil)
                      ^^^
Bizarre. This implies that one of the articles that you were trying to
expire did not have a From header.  Is that true?

[...]

> 1737 UID FETCH 3 BODY.PEEK[]
> 1737 OK UID FETCH completed
> <======================================================================>
>
> (note 1737 here above).
>
> I'm afraid I don't know enough of the IMAP protocol to understand it any
> further. :-(

Unfortunately, me neither.  When I wrote the fancy expiry stuff, I
relied on message-fetch-field to find the header to match against.

> Am I doing this thing properly, or is there an other way to reach my
> archiving goal?

If it's true that the message in question does not have a From header,
then I guess we should decide on the right behavior.  Certainly an
error is not the right behavior!

If the message does have a from header, could you run

M-: (message-fetch-field "from")

on it and see if you get something non-nil?

-Nevin