does agent expire cached articles when server expires them?

does agent expire cached articles when server expires them?

[dale.hagglund]

Hi,

I'm using the agent with caching enabled to access my employer's
exchange server via imap.  After six months, the exchange server starts
deleting old messages.  Will the agent cache remove these articles when
it detects that the server has deleted them?  I prefer to archive my
email more or less permanently, so I'm hoping this isn't the case.

Thanks in advance, 

Dale.

Re: does agent expire cached articles when server expires them?

[Greg Troxel]

  I'm using the agent with caching enabled to access my employer's
  exchange server via imap.  After six months, the exchange server starts
  deleting old messages.  Will the agent cache remove these articles when
  it detects that the server has deleted them?  I prefer to archive my
  email more or less permanently, so I'm hoping this isn't the case.

I have found agent and IMAP to be unreliable.  I would recommend
figuring out some way to copy messages to a real backup location, rather
than relying on the agent to keep them.

I view it as a bug that the agent retains messages that have been
deleted on the IMAP server; were this fixed your archive would vanish.
It could be I don't understand the point of the agent, or that agent and
IMAP don't make sense together conceptually - IMAP is not a read-only
message store, and non-gnus clients can modify it.

Re: does agent expire cached articles when server expires them?

[Steven E. Harris]

Greg Troxel <gdt@work.lexort.com> writes:

> I view it as a bug that the agent retains messages that have been
> deleted on the IMAP server;

Same here. Even though my agent-related expiration duration is /lower/
than my normal mail expiration duration, the agent entries still stick
around until I manually run `gnus-agent-expire-group'. I still don't
understand why agent expiration doesn't happen automatically, or, if it
does, why it refuses to clean up old entries long since deleted from the
backing IMAP server.

-- 
Steven E. Harris

Re: does agent expire cached articles when server expires them?

[dale.hagglund]

[I apologize if this is a duplicate post.  Operator error caused my
first posting attempt to fail, and I couldn't tell how far it got in the
process.  --dale]

greg> I have found agent and IMAP to be unreliable.  I would recommend
greg> figuring out some way to copy messages to a real backup location,
greg> rather than relying on the agent to keep them.

Thanks for the feedback.  So far, at least, I haven't run across any
weirdness, or at least not any that I've recognized.  You're probably
right about the separate backup, but I do like the fact that all my mail
is in my primary inbox.  That'll probably become too slow eventually,
though.

Until recently, I didn't use nnimap.  Rather, I would use the imap mail
source and always drag messages out of the server into an nnml group.  A
bit of work with nnmail-split-fancy solved the archiving problem.
However, recently changes have meant that I access the imap server
directly from both home and work, so sucking out the messages at one
place or the other is a no-no.  Hence the switch to nnimap.

Am I missing some capability here?  Ie, as I fetch new messages into an
nnimap group, I'd like to archive them to group in a differnet back end
(for instance, nnml). I just took a look at nnimap splitting (both
regular and facy), but it looked to me like I could only split to groups
on the same imap server.  Am I missing something.

greg> It could be I don't understand the point of the agent, or that
greg> agent and IMAP don't make sense together conceptually - IMAP is
greg> not a read-only message store, and non-gnus clients can modify it.

Dale.