6.5.6 Debugging IMAP

IMAP is a complex protocol, more so than NNTP or POP3. Implementation bugs are not unlikely, and we do our best to fix them right away. If you encounter odd behavior, chances are that either the server or Gnus is buggy.

If you are familiar with network protocols in general, you will probably be able to extract some clues from the protocol dump of the exchanges between Gnus and the server. Even if you are not familiar with network protocols, when you include the protocol dump in IMAP-related bug reports you are helping us with data critical to solving the problem. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to include the protocol dump when reporting IMAP bugs in Gnus.

Because the protocol dump, when enabled, generates lots of data, it is disabled by default. You can enable it by setting imap-log as follows:

(setq imap-log t)

This instructs the imap.el package to log any exchanges with the server. The log is stored in the buffer `*imap-log*'. Look for error messages, which sometimes are tagged with the keyword BAD---but when submitting a bug, make sure to include all the data.