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Email Cycle Check not retrieving via IMAP

Tue, 2018-09-18 03:56 — JohnDCCIU

The Email Cycle Check doesn't seem to be working properly any more, and 4.3b1 seems to have broken the settings so that they don't work even after reverting back to v4.2.2.

There have also been three longstanding bugs that didn't previously seem to affect the operation of the test, but I thought I'd report them now as well.

My test is set to send out the email via Office 365 SMTP and retrieve it via Gmail IMAP. It worked well until I ran 4.3b1, but then started reporting failures. Reverting to v4.2.2 continues to report failures, even though it was reporting success before I launched v4.3b1.

The outgoing SMTP email is working because the Simon message is arriving in the Gmail Inbox. But Simon doesn't appear to be able to retrieve it. I checked the IMAP settings and they're valid and work in a standard IMAP client (I used the macOS Mail app). I have the Gmail setting for "Allow less secure apps" turned on for IMAP access from any app.

The three other bugs that have been around for a while are:
1) the Receive section of the test's Service tab never actually shows the IMAP mailbox: it always just says "Loading Mailboxes" and is grayed out. The test worked anyway and I just use INBOX, so I ignored it as a cosmetic thing in my environment.
2) When on the Service tab, after editing the Receive account Options, a dialog will come up twice saying "An Email error occurred. / A stable connection to the server could not be established." Again, this seemed to be a harmless bug before, because the test was still working. The dialog doesn't specify which server (SMTP or IMAP) it's talking about.
3) Although the email that Simon sends out says that it will be automatically deleted (via IMAP) after the check, the email is never actually deleted.

Thanks,
John

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Wed, 2018-09-19 08:27 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Email Cycle Check not retrieving via IMAP

I'm sorry this isn't working properly for you. Using 4.3b1 shouldn't have changed anything, as it is using the same mail helper as 4.2 and earlier. Exactly the same, as I was unable to get it to rebuild.

I actually spent a number of frustrating hours last night trying to get it to build, so I could investigate this issue for you. But I failed. Apparently the recent versions of the Xcode development tools have changed the way embedded frameworks are supported (i.e. not), and I couldn't figure out any way to make it work. It's a chain of dependencies: Simon uses a mail service plugin, which in turn uses a bundled helper app, which in turn uses a third-party framework, which in turn depends on other libraries. Quite complicated, and apparently fragile to Apple's whims.

I don't have more time to investigate this now, so I'll have to come back to it for a future update. If I can't figure out a solution to building the helper, I might have to remove the Cycle service. Having a component that I can't update is not great.

If it continues to not work, all I can suggest is that you try reverting the Simon data to a backup from before trying 4.3b1, in case it somehow changed in the update. I'd be interested to know if that works.