Re: Typing in password multiple times

[Simon Josefsson <jas@pdc.kth.se>]

Tim Wilson <tdw@symbionics.co.uk> writes:

> This works, though I must confess I'm not quite sure why or what's
> going on.  Somehow each group I had created had its own server -- I
> discovered this by looking at the servers buffer.  Having edited each
> server to read merely "nnimap:exchange" I now have only one server and
> only have to enter my password once.  My thought for the GNUS and/or
> nnimap authors is: it seems it was quite easy for me to do something
> wrong, so maybe you could make it harder for me to make whatever
> mistake it was that I made.

Absolutely.

This is a rough description of whats happening: When Gnus start it
iterates through all groups and open the corresponding server. If the
server method for this group is not _exactly_ the same as one already
open (which would be the ones in `gnus-secondary-select-methods') Gnus
creates a new "foreign" server (with a made-up name) and opens
it. You'll then have to enter a password, and you'll start the
splitting procedure for every nnimap group you have, and generally
will have bad performance by having one virtual server for every
group.

By changing the group's server into a string, "nnimap:foo" Gnus will
look for a virtual nnimap server named "foo" and use it. Regardless of
its server parameters. I'm not sure what happens if there is no nnimap
server method named foo, but I think it creates (nnimap "foo") for
lack of something better.

A solution is to make all group's server method a string used to
locate the server method to use, instead of the actual server
method. This is already being done in some places of Gnus, but not
all. Kai has mentioned one situation where the old behaviour still
happen, I'll see if I can fix that one.