bug#7487: 24.0.50; Gnus nnimap broken

[Jason Rumney]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <lmi@gnus.org> writes:

>> It seems gnus-agent (which I never explicitly enabled, but have had
>> problems with in past upgrades after it was enabled by default) is out
>> of sync with the server, and deleting the ~/News/agent directory fixed
>> the problem.
>
> Gnus has stopped enabling the Agent by default now, but older
> installations can still get in the way.  I've Cc'd this to the Gnus
> mailing list -- do any of you know why the Agent got so wildly out of
> what with nnimap in the past?

In earlier versions, Agent did not work well when other mail clients
were also reading and moving mail around on the same imap account.  I
think that has not been a problem since Emacs 23. This time, I think the
sync problems happened in mail groups that had not been entered by Gnus
on this machine recently, but had had new mail read on other machines.
My guess is that Agent only updates its indexes when you enter the
group, so it can get out of sync in cases where mail is read elsewhere.

>> Following this, I configured Gnus to use imaps (which I have configured on a
>> non-standard port to get through certain firewalls but never bothered to
>> use before on localhost), and now run into a third problem.
>
> I don't follow you here.  How did you configure Gnus to use imaps?  And
> since that's the default, isn't that what failed?

I mean imaps as a protocol (SSL enabled imap), not as a port name. As I
mentioned, I am running this on a non-standard port in order to get it
through a particular firewall.

>> But my problems aren't over yet. When I quit Gnus and start it again,
>> my encryption password for authinfo.gpg doesn't appear to work.
>> Actually, it is working, because if I enter a different password, it
>> fails immediately, whereas if I enter the correct password it loops
>> forever asking for my password (maybe not forever, but my patience for
>> finding out is limited).
>
> Weird.  Could you
>
> (setq debug-on-quit t)
>
> and then `C-g' when it starts asking you again and again?  Post the
> backtrace here.

Will do. I suspect this problem may also be related to the non-standard
port.