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Claws and IMAP

So what is the cool thing of the week for those who weren’t waiting Mac OS X Leopard already? Of course is Google providing IMAP support for GMail.

Indeed it was a feature I also was waiting for a long time: I’m running my own IMAP server for years now, but that’s a bit of a hassle as I need to keep Enterprise online to get it to work and so on. Well, now I can move everything on GMail and just use that, right? Well, somewhat.

While GMail’s IMAP server works perfectly fine from the Nokia E61 and from Apple’s Mail on my MacBook Pro, it does not work correctly with Claws Mail, and I have no idea why yet.

Sniffing the traffic to know what’s going on is a bit difficult considering that the whole conversation is over SSL, so I will have to wait for Ticho to respond to my ping so I can ask him how to debug it.

On the other hand, I have to say I’m quite full of spam on my GMail account, even if their antispam filter is quite good on its own. Unfortunately up to now I used GMail mostly with POP3 and fetchmail (beside the time when Enterprise was down of course), so even when the spam passed through the filter, it was often filtered out by SpamAssassin, and trying to clean it up from GMail’s All Mail was a long and boring task (I did it a few times for the first 20 pages or so then I stopped because it was too boring and too long). Marking stuff as spam with Apple’s Mail and IMAP instead sounds easier: I can just change the order of the mails so that the ones with priority set are grouped, or group them by sender or subject, then I can select all of them and just move them on the Spam folder. Quick and easy, mostly. The problem is that I gave order to Apple’s Mail to move more than two thousands messages, and it’s taking some time to give the orders to the server.

And today is a long day..

Comments 3
  1. Yes I’ve read it. But probably it’s not just GMail, if three clients work fine with GMail’s implementation.I tend to agree with the usual vademecum of interoperability: “be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send”, so I would still find the fault in Claws.In the mean time, I moved to use KMail again.

  2. Yes, it is just GMail. Claws Mail uses a strict IMAP parser and doesn’t try to use tricks to parse unparseable stuff.For example, one of the STATUS reply is in the format:* STATUS $foldername (MESSAGES x UIDNEXT Y …)foldernames containing spaces should be quoted, like* STATUS “[Gmail]/All mail” (MESSAGES x UIDNEXT Y …)Gmail doesn’t put quotes there. We can (and probably will) put a workaround. But then parsing will fail with any folder containing parentheses in its name: how to parse the STATUS reply for a folder named, for example, “MyFolder (MESSAGES)” if it’s not quoted?* STATUS MyFolder (MESSAGES) (MESSAGES X UIDNEXT Y …)Does this look good now?It’s not about being liberal in what we accept (we know this principle), it’s about being robust and avoid worse crap-induced problems than not being able to open a folder.

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