[Mailsync-list] Re: mailsync with courier-imap and OP_READONLY

[Tomas P. <tp...@so...>]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Ian C wrote:

> hopefully I am sending this email to the right address, I grabbed it out of the
> README file for mailsync. Apologies if I am sending this to the wrong person.

Well, the README states:

| 9. Support, development, new versions and homepage
| --------------------------------------------------
|
| [...]
| If you need help or have a patch or
| suggestion to contribute then subscribe to the mailsync mailing
| list and post it there. Instructions on how to do so can be found
| on mailsyncs homepage. Tomas Pospisek will also provide commercial
| support if needed (see below).

> I am using mailsync (CVS) on FreeBSD 5.2.1 to synchonise two courier-imap
> servers. Version 4.4 worked fine, but since trying out 5.2, and subsequently CVS,
> I have been having problem with an error message stating that "Current box is
> selected READ-ONLY."
>
> I examined the output with debug and imap chatter, and also had a read of this
> thread here, which talks about a similar problem.
>
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=7984145
>
> I tried applying the patch that you mention in this post, but it did not work. I
> ended up changing every single instance of OP_READONLY in the source code to 0.
> After this, the synchonisation works fine :-)
>
> I am using c-client 2002d, with courier-imap 2.2.0.
>
> What I am interested in knowing is this - is this a bug in mailsync, or some
> problem with c-client or courier-imap?

The problem is, that support for different mail repository formats #mh, 
mmx, x-over-imap etc. are implement to various degrees in c-client which 
means that either mailsync implements to the smallest common denominator 
(which it currently more or less does) or tries to act in a different way 
depending on what it is accessing. The reason for using a library however 
is exactly this: to abstract from differences so ... well it's author is 
not willing to take any patches for the #mh format, which is the smallest 
denomitator here...

If you want to understand what OP_READONLY does than look at the c-client 
documentation, it's explained there.

The problem we're trying to work around is that as soon as we access a 
mail c-client will mark it as seen - unless the mailbox is opened 
OP_READONLY. And some mail user agents, namely mutt use the "seen" flag to 
tell the user about "new" emails. So if we want to avoid pissing off mutt 
users we need to avoid setting the "seen" flag, thus we need to do all 
reads of a mailbox in OP_READONLY mode and append "blindly".

> I would really like to get this fixed and
> start using this in production. I am not entirely confident about my solution as
> I do not completely understand what is happening. However I am willing to help in
> any way to try and fix this.
>
> Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated.. I can send you any debug output
> you might want, or give you any other information in more detail.

Yes: construct a minimal example (as few touched mailboxes and messages 
as possible, the configuration file as short as possible) and run 
mailsync with with all debug chatter enabled. Check the debug chatter 
CAREFULLY, remove all things you don't like the world to see (such as IP 
adresses or hostnames or usernames). Then send the chatter to the mailing 
list.

> ps: incidentally, the configure file for the 5.2 source download fails on FreeBSD
> 5.2.1, unless you use bash instead of /bin/sh for the configure script. Weird.

Do you mean ./configure or ./autogen.sh. I remember we've had some 
problems with different shells, but I don't remember any more... I thought 
we had fixed that?

What is the exact problem you are seeing?
*t

--
--------------------------------------------------------
   Tomas Pospisek
   http://sourcepole.com -  Linux & Open Source Solutions
--------------------------------------------------------