Subscribing to nnimap folders that are subscribed on IMAP servers

Subscribing to nnimap folders that are subscribed on IMAP servers

[Ryan Kavanagh via Announcements and discussions for GNUS, the GNU Emacs Usenet newsreader (in English)]

Hi,

I am trying to use gnus as an IMAP mail client. I have folders marked as
subscribed on my IMAP server (listed by LSUB). I would like to have gnus
automatically subscribe to these folders, or at least list them so that
I can manually subscribe gnus to them myself. How can I do so? I am
using gnus 5.13 under Emacs 27.1.

Grepping around in /usr/share/emacs/27.1/lisp/gnus, the only mention I
have found of LSUB is in the documentation for the function
gnus-group-nnimap-edit-acl, but that seems to be for editing the ACL for
an IMAP folder [0].

Digging around in the history of nnimap.el, it looks like there used to
be the following variable that would have done what I wanted, but it was
removed in 2010 [1]:

(defvar nnimap-request-list-method 'imap-mailbox-list
  "Method to use to request a list of all folders from the server.
  If this is 'imap-mailbox-lsub, then use a server-side subscription list to
  restrict visible folders.")

Is there some other variable/function I'm missing that I could use to
get this done?

Best wishes,
Ryan

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4314
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/lisp/gnus/nnimap.el?id=20a673b2d0ed2b2f75ab5d7d6e4930fdea0e1a5f

-- 
|)|/  Ryan Kavanagh  | 4E46 9519 ED67 7734 268F
|\|\  https://rak.ac | BD95 8F7B F8FC 4A11 C97A

Re: Subscribing to nnimap folders that are subscribed on IMAP servers

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Ryan Kavanagh via "Announcements and discussions for GNUS, the GNU Emacs
Usenet newsreader (in English)" <info-gnus-english@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I am trying to use gnus as an IMAP mail client. I have folders marked as
> subscribed on my IMAP server (listed by LSUB). I would like to have gnus
> automatically subscribe to these folders, or at least list them so that
> I can manually subscribe gnus to them myself. How can I do so? I am
> using gnus 5.13 under Emacs 27.1.

Best to read the "New Groups" section of the Gnus manual: that will give
you the background on `gnus-check-new-newsgroups' (you could also read
its docstring), as well as methods of subscribing to new groups.

Let us know if that doesn't clear it up!

Eric

Re: Subscribing to nnimap folders that are subscribed on IMAP servers

[Ryan Kavanagh via Announcements and discussions for GNUS, the GNU Emacs Usenet newsreader (in English)]

On Sun, Jul 31 2022, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
> Best to read the "New Groups" section of the Gnus manual: that will give
> you the background on `gnus-check-new-newsgroups' (you could also read
> its docstring), as well as methods of subscribing to new groups.
>
> Let us know if that doesn't clear it up!

gnus-check-new-newsgroups, if set, causes Gnus to call
gnus-find-new-newsgroups at startup, which then subscribes gnus to IMAP
folders according to the value of gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-method.

I tried running gnus-find-new-newsgroups with the method set to the
default (gnus-subscribe-zombies). Unfortunately, subscribing to a folder
in Gnus causes it to become subscribed *on the IMAP server itself* (I
believe thanks to nnimap-request-update-group-status). In particular,
gnus-find-new-newsgroups caused all of my IMAP folders to get marked as
subscribed on the server, which is definitely not what I
wanted. (Fortunately, I was able to restore my subscriptions from backup...)

I suppose I could set the method gnus-subscribe-interactively and
manually decide whether or not I want to subscribe to each folder in
gnus, but this would be very tedious: I have close to 200 folders spread
across my various IMAP accounts. I am not (IMAP-)subscribed to the vast
majority of these, and I do not want gnus to be subscribed to them
either.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can have gnus subscribe to just
those groups in the output of LSUB / LIST (SUBSCRIBED) [0]? I don't see
any functionality for doing so in the code base, so I suspect that this
might be a feature request...

Thanks,
Ryan

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9051#section-6.3.9.1

--
|)|/  Ryan Kavanagh  | 4E46 9519 ED67 7734 268F
|\|\  https://rak.ac | BD95 8F7B F8FC 4A11 C97A