Re: [VM] Setting up VM for the first time - imap to read on the server

[Uday Reddy]

Peter Davis writes:

> I get a message like:
> 
> Need password for fm:inbox for general operation
> 
> but no prompt.

I know the message is confusing and I have gotten it once or twice myself.

But there are a bunch of subtle things going on here.  When VM starts up, it
tries to auto-get new mail.  Then it realizes that it doesn't have a
password and gives up.  It doesn't ask for a password at this stage because
auto-get is an automatic operation and it isn't supposed to be interactive.
When you do `g' for a manual get-new-mail, then it asks for a password.

(In that case, you might wonder, why doesn't auto-get silently fail, instead
of giving a confusing message?  Well, if you are a habitual user of VM, you
would expect that VM will automatically get new mail on startup.  But, if it
fails silently, you would tend to assume that there was no new mail.)

I probably didn't get the balance of decisions right yet, but that is how
things stand at present.

Cheers,
Uday