IMAP

[taimatsu]

I am going absolutely mad. My home email setup has completely died, and I have no clue as to why. I receive email through chiark.greenend.org.uk. I use Netscape Communicator 4.6 (on Mac OS 8.6) to access it via IMAP. About a week ago, the NEtscape setup lost the chiark Trash folder, which screwed up my spam filters because I can't use Netscape to delete anything on chiark any more. (My filters are on Netscape.) Now, Netscape can't connect to chiark at all. I have tried the login.chiark greenend.org.uk address as well as the plain chiark.g.o.uk one, but nothing works. I am really, really confused. I can't save any mail locally any more, and so everything is stuck on chiark. This means I've lost all my list filtering, which is driving me potty. I may have to unsubscribe from a couple of lists because having to wade through them constantly instead of just when I feel like it is so annoying. I'm having to read my mail directly on chiark, using pine in a telnet or ssh session.

I don't know what to do. I don't understand what is wrong or what I did. If anyone knows what I can do or can help me, I will give you chocolate, hugs, beer, or pretty much anything else you name. I'm desperate.

Comments

Maybe..

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the Netscape mail bit has been known to corrupt its own config file and lose folders. If you have one somewhere you could try another mailer to see if it is just Netscape or if the Trash folder is broken.
You could also try temporarily telling Netscape to use a local Trash folder instead.

[diffrentcolours]

It might help to delete your account settings for chiark in Communicator, then add it again as a new account...

[emperor]

Just a suggestion (since I know nothing about netscape): have you tried asking postmaster@chiark, or one of the chiark newsgroups? There was an upgrade recently, so it's possible that broke things...

[chrisvenus]

Well, I think other people's suggestions are probably best. I have checked that chiark is still running an imap server and it is so its not that they have shut it down or anything. Without a username/password I can't easily check that it is working of course.

I'm not entirely clear what the chiark Trash folder is in a "why it is special and may have screwed up" way. Neither am I entirely clear on why this caused it to be unable to delete mail. It is distinctly possible that it is because Netscape is evil. :)

However, frommy general knowledge it does sound very much like netscape is fucked. In my opinion this is less than surprising since I never like using a web broswer for mail reading. :) I always felt like communicator is a bit crappy. Other people's suggestions on corrupted data are probably accurate. I'd suggest backing up everything relating to it at the moment (saved mail files, configs, etc.) and then trying to add a new profile or account or whatever for chiark.

[WARNING: bit not related to fixing problem but general comments on mail setup follow. Please ignore if you wish]

Also in a general sense I would personally reccomend either using POP3 for what you are doing (downloading a single mail folder) or using server side filtering using procmail or something.

IMAP allows you to leave mail in the structure it is found on the server. That means you can view multiple folders and so on and so forth on the server and login to the server as you are now and see things exactly the same as when you are viewing it from imap on your computer. This makes checking mail from elsewhere a lot nicer (this is what I do and it works well for me).

POP3 allows you to just download all your messages into a mailbox and has the advantage that once downloaded you no longer need the internet connection (IMAP works on mail on the server so needs quite a lot of network connectivity). You then use local filters as it sounds like you are now to sort your mail into folders.

I'm not sure if you want to play around with these sorts of things but it might make things better for you and may be worth trying if solving it with current setup doesn't work. Essentially the first option will mean that when Nutscrape does fuck up reading mail will be more painless to do directly on chiark and reading from elsewhere will be a lot easier. The latter option should give Nutscrape less things to break over.

I'm happy to expand on these if you want me to since I have been very brief with them.

Oh, and...

I'm desperate

Quote.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Also in a general sense I would personally reccomend either using POP3 for what you are doing (downloading a single mail folder) or using server side filtering using procmail or something.

Although not using IMAP only works if Chiark supports not using IMAP. And server side filtering is the way to go any way.

[chrisvenus]

Connected to login.chiark.greenend.org.uk.
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK POP3 chiark.greenend.org.uk v2001.78 server ready

I did check this first. I am a good boy. :) And I believe that secure pop is more common than secure IMAP as well as a security thing. POP and IMAP both send plain text passwords (in the same way telnet does) but I know that POP3 easily works over SSL (so is effectively SSH level of security) but Idon't think IMAP does that as easily. SO if you are paranoid about passwords use secure communication for these.

[diffrentcolours]

IMAP over SSL should be as easy as replacing imap:// with imaps://, if the server supports it.

And if it doesn't, port forwarding 143 over SSH is relatively trivial if you have SSH access to chiark :)

Re:

[chrisvenus]

I don't know but I thought that from a server point of view POP3 was much easier to set up securely than IMAP. I'm not sure of the details though, just something somebody told me once with regards another computer somewhere.

And yeah, port forwarding is relatively easy but still a bit irritating. :)