Re: nnimap problem solved by removing .agentview and .overview

[Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com>]

Mats Lidell <matsl@contactor.se> writes:

> I read my mail daily with squirrelmail as well as with gnus. I have
> noticed that mail I read with squirrelmail isn't always possible to
> see in gnus. (I haven't check if the problem always is there. Some
> mails might show up in both.) I have however found a workaround. If I
> delete the .agentview and .overview files the summary is initialized
> correctly and the mail read by squirrelmail is seen in gnus as well.
>
> There is however no way that this situation can be known from gnus. If
> it wasn't that I remember having seen those mails I wouldn't have
> missed them. So I feel that the situation is bad. nnimap shouldn't
> behave like this. Why isn't the overview-file updated when the
> contents in the imap folder is changed from outside of gnus?
>
> I have reported this before but haven't gotten any good response saying
> either that my setup is broken or that nnimap is broken. Am I the only
> one seeing this?

The problem is that, when the agent is turned on, your backend
requests don't go directly to the backend.  They instead go to the
agent which tries to respond using what it has locally cached.  If,
and only if, you request something that is not in the cache, will the
agent request the MISSING content from the real backend.

Frankly, I don't see how to make the agent work better with nnimap
without introducing nnimap specific code into the agent or changing
the backend interface.  Neither is something to take lightly so I
don't believe that this situation will be changing anytime soon.

One possibility, have you set gnus-agent-consider-all-articles to t?
If you do so, the agent will let gnus download read messages.  That
may fix part of your problem.

If that doesn't help, then I'd suggest that you either 1) turn off the
agent, or 2) periodically delete the .agentview file.  You shouldn't
need to delete the .overview file.

Kevin