severity 446332 grave thanks In trying to track down why imap accounts at work (using UW-imapd, which uses c-client, which alpine uses), are getting screwed up when being accessed multiple times, I got reminded of this ancient bug that still exists.
To reproduce, open up pine on your inbox, open up another pine on your inbox, and try to mark something as deleted in the first pine session which is now readonly. It will succeed. If you're lucky, the status line at top will say "readonly", but it will still succeed to look like it has deleted a mail. But the changes won't be reflected on disk. In pine, the requested action (anything other than appending to a mailbox, which uses a different locking method, at least in the case of MBOX files) should just be refused. In imap, again the action should be NAKed. It should *never* be made to look like it succeeded. And in my case at home using plain old MBOX access, this is not even on an nfs store - just plain old local filesystems, which should not be hard to get right (hah! Have you ever traced through the c-client locking code? Furrfu! At work, it also fails, but of course that's on nfs, which makes things more tricky especially given the farcical locking code in c-client). You might think that not getting your deleted (and new, and read, and important, etc) flags updated is hardly dataloss, but the CEO is breathing down my boss's back because his secretary keeps on trying to delete 800 mails at a time only to have them come back and haunt her when she restarts her imap mail client in the morning, due to a new phone system we have which always wants to be connected to the IMAP store. The user should not be expected to understand that they can only connect one imap client at a time, especially when that isn't visibly enforced! Now, we use a different version of imapd at work, but in tracing the code, I'm pretty sure the debian package suffers from the same bug (since the mbox pine bug definitely exists on debian, pine just uses c-client, and imap also uses c-client, it would make sense for this all to be just the same bug in c-client), and it'd be nice to at least have it fixed somewhere (maybe I can win an argument for putting debian on our mail server at work). -- TimC This plane is not equipped with vertices. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
