Re: Gnus stuck in nnimap-wait-for-response with local dovecot

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Christoph Groth <christoph@grothesque.org> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I’m still using a mail setup that involves Gnus with nnimap and a local
> dovecot that is run on demand.  I sync mail between the local maildir
> (that is used by dovecot when it runs) and remote IMAP servers using
> isync/mbsync.
>
> I learned about this setup from Eric Abrahamsen on the ding mailing list
> in the old days.  I believe that the original presentation of the idea
> was this blog post:
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20160427162529/http://roland.entierement.nu/blog/2010/09/08/gnus-dovecot-offlineimap-search-a-howto.html
>
> On the Gnus side, the setup is based on setting nnimap-shell-program to
>
> "/usr/lib/dovecot/imap -o mail_location=maildir:$HOME/.mail/%s/ 2>>$HOME/.dovecot.err"
>
> only that this happens inside a setup involving fancy splitting.  (This
> way of using dovecot seems to be somewhat obscure, or at least
> I haven’t been able to find much documentation about it.)
>
> Anyway, my setup has been working like this for many years now, but
> there’s a wart.  Whenever there is new mail and I launch M-x gnus, it
> will typically freeze during startup and I have to abort with C-g and
> retry.  After retrying one or two times Gnus does start and everything
> seems to work normally.  The new mail is visible in Gnus.
>
> Here is the kind of the backtrace that I can typically obtain in the
> situation
>
> Debugger entered: ("Quit")
>   nnimap-wait-for-response(839)
>   nnimap-get-groups()

I can't really guess why this would be happening. The call to
`nnimap-request-scan' should be setting everything up properly, so far
as I know. Perhaps someone else will have some better tips for
debugging. My only other suggestion would be switching to dovecot as an
always-on system service, and then switching Gnus to using "localhost"
as the IMAP server address. It seems entirely plausible that that will
improve things.