Re: [Evolution] many problems with imap

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

[comments/answers below]

On 17 Aug 2001 15:54:02 -0400, Craig Longman wrote:
> hi there,
>
> i am running evolution (downgraded to 0.12 from the lastest snap, as the
> latest snap seems to completely broken the filters).  i am having
> numerous problems with my imap setup.  i have two mail servers, one
> local and one over an encrypted link via a cable modem to another
> machine across the continent.
>
> quite frequently ( 20-30 times a day ) the updating of the one or more
> of the folders just stops.  this is annoying enough, but the real
> problem is that it then completely locks up the whole machine normally.
> sometimes, i can still look at other folders, but that is the exception.
> and this happens on both servers.  its almost like the entire imap
> section is all considered one big critical section, or there is only
> ever one thread used to look at the mail servers and when it hangs
> everything just has to wait.  it seems to be imap specific, i had been
> using pop3 with no problems for a while.
>
> my questions are:
> - is imap intended to be considered stable at initial release, or is
> that going to come later?

it's intended to be "stable" by 1.0

> - has anyone found that the uw-imap is perhaps causing all my problems?
> and if so, is there a better choice (not cyrus-imap, the damn rpm
> available wasted a full day to no avail trying to get it to work).

wu.imapd isn't exactly the best imapd out there (not sure which one I'd
say is), but Evolution should work fine with it. If it doesn't, then
it's a bug.

> i'm working on some bug reports for this.  that bugzilla makes it quite
> a complicated process...  but i'm trying.

It's not *that* complicated, bugzilla.ximian.com; click on New Bug link,
then select Evolution as the product then decide if it's a mailer bug, a
calendar bug, an addressbook bug, or whatever and select the component,
add a comment in the comment field and a summary description in the
space provided and click "submit".

The IMAP bugs should be submitted to the mailer component.

> and finally, i have been advised that if i want to create a
> sub-directory on an imap server, i should tell the imap client to create
> a 'folder' with a trailing slash on the end of it.

Who told you that? That would be an undocumented feature of wu.imapd if
it supported that afaik.

> this will 'trick'
> the server into creating a directory, that i can then store sub-folders
> in.  however, evolution blocks this, insisting that the directory name
> is not valid.

Because it's not valid.

> the uw-imap (by default) does not support sub-folders,
> when you create a folder it makes a file that is used to store the email
> in in mbox format.  

This is unfortunately correct.

> to futher frustrate me, i manually created a
> direcctory in the mail dir, but evolution simply ignores it.  

You need to subscribe to the folder before you'll see it, you can do
this by using the Tools->Manage Subscriptions dialog.

> i looked
> in the ~/evolution/mail/imap/craigl begeek com file, but found that more
> than half of the existing server folders weren't present in there, so i
> was very reluctant to simply add it in.  are there any plans to address
> this?

Jeff