nnimap/nnagent troubles

[Christoph Rohland <cr@sap.com>]

Hi folks,

after fiddling one whole day with my gnus setup on my laptop I have to
get some words out.

Gnus should definitely give more output on error conditions! If the
network connection fails, there is no way (known to me) to get the
actual error (like "connection to <host>:<port> via {tcp|openssl}
failed with error <errno>, <strerror>". So if something goes wrong the
user is lost in the dark.

Now to the more specific errors all on :
Gnus v5.8.7
XEmacs 21.1 (patch 8) "Bryce Canyon" [Lucid] (i386-redhat-linux, Mule)

1) agent: 
   a) why does the agent store all the server parameters in
      agent/lib/servers? So any change to server parameters invalidates
      the agent setup. The server name should be sufficient.
2) .newsrc.eld:
   I tried to use ssl as connection type, but somehow my
   laptop did not use it despite the fact that I did set the
   parameter in gnus-secondary-select-methods. 
   a) I discovered, that gnus had stored the nnimap-address as group
      parameters in all groups. Apparently preventing the use of the
      server setup (agent still used the server settings)
   b) After removing these Group parameters things became more wierd:
      Doing 'g' did lead to denied nnimap server, but doing 'J Y' did
      open a connection!?! (Took me some time to realize what
      happened. It looked first like random failures)
   c) I compared my .newsrc.eld with a working one and realized that
      the broken one had stored (nnimap "") instead of "nnimap:" in
      .newsrc.eld for every group. After replacing these everything
      works now again (and with ssl).

To find all this took me lots of dialups and shuffling of
configurations. Unfortunately this was not the first time I had to dig
deep into the internals of gnus. If something failes it is _very_ hard
to find the cause. That's the reason why I cannot recommend it to
other users. There are not a lot people who are willing to spend so
much time on their mail setup.

But still: As long as it works it is the best mailreader I know!

Greetings
                Christoph