bug#21182: 25.0.50; gnus: every other unread message is marked as read on each nnimap group refresh

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On 26 Jan 2017, Lars Ingebrigtsen spake thusly:

> Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>
>> Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk> writes:
>>
>>> The first bad commit is
>>>
>>> commit 242354a23acf214ad06d4e3e7e5f5580c8b21d4a (HEAD, refs/bisect/bad)
>>> Author: Trevor Murphy <trevor.m.murphy@gmail.com>
>>> Date:   Mon Jan 26 07:56:37 2015 +0000
>>>
>>>     lisp/gnus/nnimap.el Allow using the Google X-GM-LABELS, if present
>>>
>>> and indeed reverting this causes the devastating automatically-mark-
>>> every-other-item-as-read behaviour to go away. I am *not* using gmail,
>>> but Beehive, so clearly this is negatively affecting other imap servers,
>>> when it should obviously have no effect on them.
>>
>> Huh.  That patch should have no effect on any servers that say nil to
>> (nnimap-capability "X-GM-EXT-1"), unless I'm reading it wrong.
>>
>> And nnimap is not behaving on this strange way for me, and I don't use
>> Gmail, so I don't quite understand this.
>
> Are you still seeing this?  Nobody else has reported anything similar (I
> think), so I suspect it's something particular with your setup or server...

I haven't retried for a few months: I'm running with that patch backed
out. I'll check again, but I think it's quite unlikely that the problem
has gone away. It was still present when I last checked, and nothing has
changed in this part of Gnus at all since then, at least not on the
Emacs 25 branch where I'm living.

I did a bunch more tracking down in the bug back in June last year: see
<https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=21182#30>.

I would be utterly, cosmically unsurprised to find that the problem was
specific to the format of the IMAP sent back by the crawling horror
which is Beehive. (I could see if I could convince Drew Adams to set up
Gnus to talk to the Oracle external IMAP server, but I suspect that if I
tell him that this is to try to replicate a bug that makes every other
mail get marked as read he'll tell me to bugger off, he likes his read
states just the way they are!)

-- 
NULL && (void)