nnimap - not quite there yet?

[Joe Casadonte <jcasadonte@northbound-train.com>]

Before I spend copious amounts of free-time trying to fix what I'm
about to rant about, perhaps someone could tell me if there are
already plans to fix these things.  Or possibly fixes are already in
Oort (though I downloaded it and grepped thru the Changelog quickly
and didn't see anything specifically on these issues).  My setup is a
little odd, and perhaps I need to change it, but until I do, I have
the following problems.

My setup: I have multiple accounts on multiple IMAP servers.
Specifically, 8 accounts on one IMAP server and one on another.  I
differentiate these accounts as being various virtual servers in my
gnus-secondary-select-methods list.

My problems:

1) Despite everything I've tried, mostly with levels, I cannot avoid
   having all accounts logged into at Gnus startup.  I only want two
   or three accounts checked, and I'll check the others once every
   couple of days.  Perhaps I need to define the virtual servers but
   make them inactive somehow, and then manually activate them from
   the server buffer?  Aside from not knowing how to do that off-hand,
   it seems a bit of a PITA.

2) Again, despite attempts to change the behavior (mostly with levels)
   I cannot avoid having nnimap check every folder when I do a
   gnus-group-get-new-news.  The folders don't /activate/, mind you, but
   I have to sit thru every one of them being checked.

3) For each virtual IMAP server, an imap process is launched and kept
   hanging around.  With 9 virtual servers, that's just too much.  It
   would be much better if there was one IMAP process that kept
   flipping back and forth.  Yeah, there's a lag with login and all,
   but I'd rather have that then multiple connections hanging around
   doing nothing.  One solution is to have a pool of IMAP connections,
   the limit to which could be configurable (1 for me, N for others).

4) As has been mentioned elsewhere in recent threads, nnimap (and all
   of Gnus for that matter) is not terribly fault tolerant.  If a
   server connection goes down, the connection needs to be severed
   manually before it can be reconnected.  Again, this is more of a
   general Gnus issue, I think, but nnimap seems a bit more stubborn
   then nntp.

Some of these things are OK from an IMAP standpoint, but I'm trying to
buy into the whole "mail is just strangely formatted news" idiom, and
these are some of the things holding me back.  Having said all of
that, I'd be more then happy to jump in and try to fix some of them,
being a firm believer in being a part of the solution (as well as the
problem).

Thanks for listening!

--
Regards,

joe
Joe Casadonte
jcasadonte@northbound-train.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Llama Fresh Farms => http://www.northbound-train.com
   Gay Media Resource List => http://www.northbound-train.com/gaymedia.html
            Perl for Win32 => http://www.northbound-train.com/perlwin32.html
               Emacs Stuff => http://www.northbound-train.com/emacs.html
          Music CD Trading => http://www.northbound-train.com/cdr.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                       Live Free, that's the message!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------