nnimap - uidvalid problem

nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Chris D.Halverson]

I came back from lunch today and as I started to read my mail, I got
the following error from Gnus using nnimap:

nnimap: Group INBOX is not uidvalid.

It then asked if I wanted to continue. I said "yes" and it went on. It
worked for a while, but now I can't get anything. 

Is there some process I need to do to make it "valid" again or am I
just screwed? :) It seems to work w/ pine and mutt (not included Gnus
marks of course).

Thanks!

cdh

-- 
Chris D. Halverson                         Complete Internet Solutions
PGP mail accepted, finger for public key   http://www.CompleteIS.com/~cdh/

Re: nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Kai Großjohann]

"Chris D.Halverson" <cdh@CompleteIS.com> writes:

> I came back from lunch today and as I started to read my mail, I got
> the following error from Gnus using nnimap:
> 
> nnimap: Group INBOX is not uidvalid.

This means that the server has renumbered the articles.  And Gnus
remembers stuff based on the article number.  So if Gnus has
remembered that article 42 was ticked, but this article now has number
23, Gnus will be mightily confused.

nnimap can find out about this situation and warn you (which it did),
but it can't fix the situation.

I think you can kill the group in question, then subscribe it again.
(Maybe you have to quit Gnus then start it again before subscribing
the group.)  This will make Gnus forget everything it knew about the
group (except the name, perhaps), and so Gnus will ask for information
from the server, and all is fine.

Maybe a simpler way to do it is to say M-x gnus-group-clear-data RET
on the group.  But I don't know what gnus-group-clear-data does.

kai
-- 
Beware of flying birch trees.

Re: nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Chris D.Halverson]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii, Size: 1710 bytes --]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> This means that the server has renumbered the articles.  And Gnus
> remembers stuff based on the article number.  So if Gnus has
> remembered that article 42 was ticked, but this article now has number
> 23, Gnus will be mightily confused.

I'm with you so far.

> nnimap can find out about this situation and warn you (which it did),
> but it can't fix the situation.

OK.

> I think you can kill the group in question, then subscribe it again.
> (Maybe you have to quit Gnus then start it again before subscribing
> the group.)  This will make Gnus forget everything it knew about the
> group (except the name, perhaps), and so Gnus will ask for information
> from the server, and all is fine.

Didn't work. I dug around a little bit and found
~/News/overview/nnimap.mail.INBOX.novcache. A ha! Looks like a cache
of subjects, numbers, etc. Let's remove that and see what happens.

Not much.

I then did something even more drastic. I removed that novcache file,
then moved my spool (ie. INBOX) out of the way (ie. I now have no
INBOX). Then I fired up Gnus again. I send a message to myself. It now
realizes I have just one message, however it still says uidinvalid.

*sigh*

> Maybe a simpler way to do it is to say M-x gnus-group-clear-data RET
> on the group.  But I don't know what gnus-group-clear-data does.

Didn't seem to do anything.

I appreciate the ideas, and it seemed to do something, just not
everything yet. Anything else?

cdh

-- 
Chris D. Halverson                         Complete Internet Solutions
PGP mail accepted, finger for public key   http://www.CompleteIS.com/~cdh/

Re: nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> "Chris D.Halverson" <cdh@CompleteIS.com>:

> Didn't seem to do anything.

> I appreciate the ideas, and it seemed to do something, just not
> everything yet. Anything else?

What IMAP daemon are you using?  I'm using UoW imapd with mbox
folders, and got an uidvalidity problem when I subscribed to an nnimap 
group for which there was no matching mbox file at the time, just an
empty file I had created with touch.

The message never went away even after real messages had started
appearing in the file, so I finally _deleted_ the group and
resubscribed.

Re: nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Kai Großjohann]

"Chris D.Halverson" <cdh@CompleteIS.com> writes:

> I then did something even more drastic. I removed that novcache file,
> then moved my spool (ie. INBOX) out of the way (ie. I now have no
> INBOX). Then I fired up Gnus again. I send a message to myself. It now
> realizes I have just one message, however it still says uidinvalid.

Type `G p' on the group.  Does it have a uidvalidity value?  I was
hoping that this information was deleted after `C-k' on the group, but
maybe I was wrong.

I think you need to do the following:

(1) Make sure Gnus knows nothing about the group.  Exit Gnus and have
    a look in ~/.newsrc.eld to make sure that you have done the right
    thing.  Just search for the group name and see if Gnus has stored
    any information about the group.

(2) Remove the overview cache file.  (Thanks for pointing this out, I
    had forgotten about that file completely.)

(3) Start Gnus again and resubscribe the group.

Maybe I ought to test the whole thing right now.

kai
-- 
Beware of flying birch trees.

Re: nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Kai Großjohann]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> (1) Make sure Gnus knows nothing about the group.  Exit Gnus and have
>     a look in ~/.newsrc.eld to make sure that you have done the right
>     thing.  Just search for the group name and see if Gnus has stored
>     any information about the group.

I just tried this on a group.  I hit `C-k' on it, and then I hit `s'
to tell Gnus to save everything.  I had a look in ~/.newsrc.eld and
there were no traces whatsoever about the group name.

Does this work for you as well, so far?

kai
-- 
Beware of flying birch trees.

Re: nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Chris D.Halverson]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii, Size: 1523 bytes --]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Type `G p' on the group.  Does it have a uidvalidity value?  I was
> hoping that this information was deleted after `C-k' on the group, but
> maybe I was wrong.

Yes it did, and did so immediately after I created it again.

> I think you need to do the following:
> 
> (1) Make sure Gnus knows nothing about the group.  Exit Gnus and have
>     a look in ~/.newsrc.eld to make sure that you have done the right
>     thing.  Just search for the group name and see if Gnus has stored
>     any information about the group.
> 
> (2) Remove the overview cache file.  (Thanks for pointing this out, I
>     had forgotten about that file completely.)
> 
> (3) Start Gnus again and resubscribe the group.

That worked. Not sure how this is different than what I did
earlier. Here's exactly what I did:

1. I C-k the group

2. Examined ~/.newsrc.eld to ensure it wasn't there

3. Removed the overview cache file

4. Started Gnus and did a "G m" to remake the group and everything
worked. 

Earlier I had done a "A A" and re-subscribed to it. Evidently this is
different than "G m" the group as the "A A" try seemed to pull out old
values for somewhere.

Thanks for your help! This was a little more "interesting" because it
was my INBOX. *whew* 

Thanks again!

cdh

-- 
Chris D. Halverson                         Complete Internet Solutions
PGP mail accepted, finger for public key   http://www.CompleteIS.com/~cdh/

Re: nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Arcady Genkin]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Groъjohann) writes:

> This means that the server has renumbered the articles.  And Gnus
> remembers stuff based on the article number.  So if Gnus has
> remembered that article 42 was ticked, but this article now has number
> 23, Gnus will be mightily confused.

Under what circumstances does the IMAP server rename articles? I guess
when the articles numbers get too large?.. Do you mean that one day I
can lose all of my marks in a group out of the blue that way? Is there
a way to preserve the marks when Gnus warns about the uivalidity (or
whatever)? And finally, what marks are going to be lost (I'm mostly
concerned about ticked messages).

Puzzled,
-- 
Arcady Genkin
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Re: nnimap - uidvalid problem

[Kai Großjohann]

Arcady Genkin <antipode@thpoon.com> writes:

> Under what circumstances does the IMAP server rename articles?

I'm not sure.  I think that the Cyrus server does this when the group
is empty.  Ie, whenever a group becomes empty, the server changes
uidvalidity.

> I guess when the articles numbers get too large?

That would be a possibility.

I think it is not possible to predict when the uidvalidity will
change, because that depends on how the server assigns the numbers.
For example, with a server that assigns the uids based on the phase of
the moon, the uidvalidity will change with the phase of the moon.

Seriously, though, I can think of two reasonable implementation of
uids which lead to different uidvalidity changes.  One implementation
would be to keep the messages in a file and that the uid counts the
messages from the beginning of the file.  For this implementation, the
uidvalidity would change whenever you delete a message.  Another
implementation would be to use ever-increasing article numbers, like
NNTP servers.  For this implementation, the uids would very rarely
change, maybe just when the numbers get too large.

> Do you mean that one day I can lose all of my marks in a group out
> of the blue that way?

No, no.  The beauty of IMAP is that the information is stored on the
server side.  This means that you can use Gnus from different hosts
and they will see the same information.  And this also means that you
can kill the group in Gnus and then resubscribe it, and even though
all traces of the group were deleted from ~/.newsrc.eld when killing,
the marks are not lost.

You've got to remove the overview cache, though.  But this is just a
performance problem.

And you will have a problem with cached articles.  You have to move
them out of the way.

kai
-- 
Beware of flying birch trees.