is it me or is imap support really crappy?

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com>]

hi all,

sorry for the (possibly) offensive subject, but the problems i've been
seeing the past few days with my imap mailboxes aren't really building my
confidence in Gnus+imap...

ok, for some details. i have two imap mailboxes i'm (trying to) manage
with Gnus. one is a fastmail account, the other is my university's mail
server. i've set gnus-secondary-select-methods as follows:

#v+

(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
      '((nnimap "Fastmail"
		(nnimap-address "mail.messagingengine.com")
		(nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.authinfo"))
	(nnimap "Uni Frankfurt"
		(nnimap-address "imap.server.uni-frankfurt.de")
		(nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.authinfo"))))

#v-

after a few days, i started noticing that new mail on the university's
server never showed up in Gnus. that is, hitting 'g' in the groups buffer
wouldn't find it. (new mail on the fastmail server was found, though.) i
would only see new mail if i restarted Gnus and entered the nnimap group.

btw, when i fire up Gnus, a connection to the uni's imap server is
established, the subscribed groups are listed, but Gnus doesn't say how
many new messages there are in each group. instead, it just shows an
asterisk (*).

one possible cause i could find on google was that the groups on the
university's server may be foreing groups. however, i was unable to find
any info on how i could tell if they were, and the suggested solution
(unsubscribe, kill, retreive active file and resubscribe) didn't change
anything.

i found the key binding M-g would find new mail on the server, but
also not entirely reliably.

i also found that the messages Gnus displayed when i entered a group on
either imap server (i.e. this happened with *both* the fastmail and the
uni's server) i would see lots of messages that were already deleted. (not
just marked as expirable, but actually deleted: if i selected them for
viewing, Gnus would report that the message wasn't available and might have
expired.) doing M-g would *not* get rid of these messages. and what's more,
after leaving and re-entering the group, the *same* messages Gnus had just
reported didn't exist anymore still showed up in the summary buffer.

i then disabled the agent for the imap servers (`J r' in the server
buffer), and that at least got rid of the non-existing messages.

the current situation is that when i enter the university's inbox, what i
end up seeing is the contents of the fastmail inbox. i haven't got a clue
how i or Gnus managed to do this, but it looks very wrong...

so, there you have it. either i'm as daft as the proverbial brush (a
possibility that i unfortunately cannot exclude ;-) and i'm doing something
very stupid, or Gnus' imap support simply isn't up to speed. if anyone
could shed some light on which one it is, (and possibly offer some help to
solve my problems if it is indeed the former) i'd be very grateful.


TIA

joost


PS: i also do some splitting on the imap groups, but i doubt that has
anything to do with the problems i'm seeing. anyway, just to be sure:

#v+

(setq nnimap-split-inbox
      '("INBOX" "inbox"))

(setq nnimap-split-rule
      '(("Fastmail" ("INBOX" (("INBOX.Lug Frankfurt" "Subject: .*LugFrankfurt"))))
	("Uni Frankfurt" ("inbox" (("mail/LinguistList" "From: LINGUIST list"))))))

#v-




-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments