IMAP alert in GMAIL

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 signaling 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 is suprisingly marked as read.

This is obviously not acceptable, so we immediately took out 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 paramter (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 out 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 and even my iPhone was effected.




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 mail's BODY from gmail.