Wednesday, November 4, 2009

[EN] Woke up this morning to find that all the mails I received during the night were already marked as read in my Gmail Inbox.






Woke up this morning to find that all the mails I received during the night were already marked as read in my gMail Inbox!

Strange, but I've seen stranger things before, so I grabbed another coffee and headed for Kwaga's office. As soon as I turned on my iMac I found a message on our getSatisfaction site from one of our dear beta users echoing the same problem.

Humm... So I sat down to test and yes indeed since sometime last night, after the Kwaga server treats the body of a mail through its IMAP connection, the mail becomes suprisingly marked as read.

This is obviously not acceptable, so we immediately took our servers offline (with a tweet and a mail to our beta users) and went deep in hacker mode. To resolve this we simply set a parameter (Peek Mode) in IMAP that was previously ignored by Gmail. After validating the fix a few minutes later, thanks to our awesome continuous development framework (thanks Fred), we were able to push a hotfix live and restart our service.

From start to finish, Kwaga was back online in 20 minutes.

I then relaxed and searched on Twitter and it appears others were also impacted when Google modified how it handles IMAP GET MESSAGE BODY. Even mails on my iPhone were effected by this.




Anyway, thank you to our first user who pinged us so that we could correct this in real time. And for all of you IMAP Geeks around the world, set the PEEK mode to TRUE if you get an mail's BODY from Gmail.

5 comments:

  1. Eric PommereauNov 4, 2009 05:30 AM
    Insteresting, i had the problem too.

    Finally it was was just a parameter (peek mode) set by gmail team during the night ?

    Do they communicate about params update like this case ?

    Best Regards

    Eric Pommereau
    ReplyDelete
  2. KwagaNov 4, 2009 07:27 AM
    Hello Eric,
    In this case, nobody was aware that this parameter would become required by Gmail.

    Kind regards,
    Joshua
    the Kwaga team
    Kwaga.com
    ReplyDelete
  3. RobertNov 4, 2009 08:29 AM
    I had the same problem. I was confused as I recognised a strange IP. The first thing I thought - someone was in my gmail account. I changed all my passwords.
    ReplyDelete
  4. SpikeNov 4, 2009 10:06 AM
    More than just an IMAP problem? I'm having this issue viewing Gmail on Firefox.
    ReplyDelete
  5. HayssamNov 4, 2009 02:32 PM
    Aha!

    I'm wondering whether that first whiny user was me?!! :D

    Anyways thanks Kwaga team for handling this issue so well.

    Bon vent à Kwaga! :)

    Hayssam
    ReplyDelete