Problem with large UID numbers

Problem with large UID numbers

[Andreas Most]

Hi,

I am having problems with getting Mail from web.de.
The symptons were that gnus showed an unrealistic large number of
articles for the imap folders that contained messages. Entering such a
folder led to an error stating that there is a problem with a TLS packet
size. 

I could figure out by taking a tcpdump trace while accessing my mail
with thunderbird that the problem is quite large UID numbers like e.g.:

* 30 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent \Seen) UID 591821746)
* 31 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent \Seen) UID 606333535)
* 32 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent \Seen) UID 608638667)

In imap.el the UIDs are stored in integer variables, but according to
the elisp manual integer variables have a size of only 28 bits, i.e. the
largest number that can be used is 268435455. 

I guess the same problem is also present for pop3 access, which I
haven't tried. I found an old posting where someone reported a
problem with pop3 access to web.de but there was no solution given.

Any ideas what I can do here apart from stopping using web.de?

Andreas.
--
AndreasDotMostAtGmailDotCom

Re: Problem with large UID numbers

[Andreas Most]

Andreas Most <Andreas.Most@nospam.invalid> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I am having problems with getting Mail from web.de.
> The symptons were that gnus showed an unrealistic large number of
> articles for the imap folders that contained messages. Entering such a
> folder led to an error stating that there is a problem with a TLS packet
> size. 
>
> I could figure out by taking a tcpdump trace while accessing my mail
> with thunderbird that the problem is quite large UID numbers like e.g.:
>
> * 30 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent \Seen) UID 591821746)
> * 31 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent \Seen) UID 606333535)
> * 32 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent \Seen) UID 608638667)
>
> In imap.el the UIDs are stored in integer variables, but according to
> the elisp manual integer variables have a size of only 28 bits, i.e. the
> largest number that can be used is 268435455. 
>
> I guess the same problem is also present for pop3 access, which I
> haven't tried. I found an old posting where someone reported a
> problem with pop3 access to web.de but there was no solution given.
>
> Any ideas what I can do here apart from stopping using web.de?

I found the following comment in the code:

;; Todo:
;;
;; o Parse UIDs as strings? We need to overcome the 28 bit limit somehow.

That doesn't solve the problem but it answers the question...

As I have read in the EmacsWiki there seems to be a general problem with
the limited size:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsFileSizeLimit

Maybe it is possible to use floating point variables instead of integer
as a workaround.

Andreas.

--
AndreasDotMostAtGmailDotCom

Re: Problem with large UID numbers

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:18:20 +0100 Andreas Most <Andreas.Most@nospam.invalid> wrote: 

AM> I found the following comment in the code:

AM> ;; Todo:
AM> ;;
AM> ;; o Parse UIDs as strings? We need to overcome the 28 bit limit somehow.

AM> That doesn't solve the problem but it answers the question...

AM> As I have read in the EmacsWiki there seems to be a general problem with
AM> the limited size:
AM> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsFileSizeLimit

AM> Maybe it is possible to use floating point variables instead of integer
AM> as a workaround.

I'm trying to get large ints into the next Emacs somehow as support for
a "very large file" mode (not modifying the regular integer type).
Maybe they can be used for this as well.  There's a thread on emacs-devel.

Ted