[pkg-fetchmail-maint] Bug#348964: fetchmail is incapable of reading read-only folders even with -k

[Matthias Andree]

Alexander Zangerl <az at debian.org> writes:

> if you have public imap folders which the server marks
> READ-ONLY, then fetchmail will always abort after the SELECT
> stage with the message "mailbox selection failed".

[...]

> this behaviour is broken, as not being able to delete emails from the
> server is fine if the user tells fetchmail to keep messages.
> there is no technical reason for fetchmail to assume server failure on
> a read-only select result if -k is given.

[...]

Not quite. The imap_ok() code has too little context to decide that at
the moment, and I'm not fixing this for 6.3.X. I'm putting this bug on
the 6.4.0 TODO list.

The wider context of this problem is: fetchmail needs to set the \Seen
flag to avoid redownloading messages, so the requirement is not only -k
but "-ka" ("--fetchall --keep") - this seems a rather tight constraint,
but we can fix this case nonetheless since it's just two lines of code
for 6.2.X and 6.3.X. Given that I as upstream maintainer am no longer
able to support 6.2.X, you'll need to live with the 6.3.2-rc4 patch
(attached). It fails for NEWS and warns of an offset for imap.c, but
should work.

My longer-term goal is to have fetchmail 6.4 track the UIDs at the
client side, which will remove the "--fetchall" requirement and make
"--keep" sufficient. We'll then see the fix of this bug, too.

(tagging this bug "upstream confirmed patch" and cloning it as a
wishlist item for 6.4)

-- 
Matthias Andree
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