[Kde-pim] change IMAP server address

[Daniel Vrátil]

On čtvrtek 15. října 2015 20:57:08 CEST Romain wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thx for getting back!
> 
> Would it make sense to have a dialog that pops up when the user is changing
> the URL, asking if that's pointing to the exact same data ?
> That would allow to solve this use case without having to throw everything
> away, and the user can reliably decide what to do.

Users tend to out-smart applications thinking they know better and then booom 
:) Also users might not be aware of some technical details, like the new URL 
actually being a different server with different configuration only running on 
top of the same data etc. We cannot expect our users to have enough knowledge 
about the underlying infrastructure, IMAP and Akonadi implementation to be 
able to correctly judge the situation.

> To me it seems that a user changing a URL likely means it's the same data,
> otherwise he or she would create a different account/resource.

I think that changing URL to another one that points to the exactly same 
server is a very rare case. More typical situation is that the company 
migrates from mail solution A to mail solution B, telling their employees that 
"we migrated from A to B, now B has all your emails that you used to have on 
A, except for new emails won't be deliver to A anymore. Please adjust your 
email clients.". Technically, B has the same data as A, but it is an import, 
so the emails will have different UIDs.

In fact, we would detect this particular case just fine because UIDVALIDITY of 
all folders would change, causing the IMAP resource to re-sync all folders 
from scratch. Which brings as back to start: if changing URL forces full 
resync in almost all cases, why even support it within the resource, and not 
force users to create a new resource.


Dan

> 
> What do you think ?

> Cheers,
> Romain.
> 
> On 14 October 2015 at 11:05, Daniel Vrátil <dvratil at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Monday, October 5, 2015 10:25:07 AM CEST Romain wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > > I've been hit with a weird issue this morning : my company made the
> > > 'unfortunate' choice a few years ago to switch from Gmail to
> > > Office365...
> > > this morning there were some DNS resolution issues with
> > > outlook.office365.com not responding.
> > > I noticed outlook-emeasouth.office365.com was working much better. I
> > > changed the server address in the KMail / akonadi IMAP resource config
> > 
> > but
> > 
> > > it seems kmail did not like this at all. the resource was still there in
> > > the akonadi console but KMail did not show it and could not access/view
> > 
> > any
> > 
> > > mails from KMail. Even reverting to outlook.office365.com, rebooting,
> > > etc... did not work either.
> > > 
> > > I therefore had to remove the resource entirely and now it's doing a new
> > > full sync from  the server, which is annoying because it contains
> > 
> > thousands
> > 
> > > and thousands of emails from way back, but it's done it in the past
> > 
> > without
> > 
> > > problems so i'll let it complete.
> > > 
> > > Are you aware of this behaviour ? is it "allowed" / expected to be able
> > 
> > to
> > 
> > > change the IMAP server address ? wondering if akonadi does not use the
> > > server address as an identifier somewhere and would get confused if it
> > 
> > gets
> > 
> > > changed.
> > 
> > Normally changing the server URL should force the the IMAP resource to
> > throw
> > away all cached data and sync everything again (so you would not avoid it
> > anyway), simply because there's no 100% reliable way for us to know
> > whether
> > the new URL points to the same server and account as the old one (and yes,
> > we
> > also use the URL as part of remote identifiers).
> > 
> > The fact that the resource got stuck for you is unfortunate, this is not
> > very
> > widely tested feature :-) I tried with my Kolab (because that's the only
> > server that I can access from multiple URLs) and it indeed got stuck after
> > changing server URL, but after restarting Akonadi it synced correctly.
> > 
> > Thinking about it, it might make sense to disallow changing the URL and
> > user
> > name in the IMAP resource once it's configured, forcing people to remove
> > the
> > IMAP resource and create a new one if they want to change the server
> > and/or
> > username, because they will need to sync all their mail from scratch
> > anyway
> > and we know that this way it works rather reliably.
> > 
> > Dan
> > 
> > > Thanks for letting me know!
> > > Cheers,
> > > Romain.
> > 
> > --
> > Daniel Vrátil
> > Email: dvratil at kde.org
> > Jabber: dan.vratil at kdetalk.net
> > IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi)

-- 
Daniel Vrátil
www.dvratil.cz | dvratil at kde.org
IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi, #fedora-kde)

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