Re: mutt hangs when using remote imap server over home broadband
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 08:54:15AM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Thursday, July 31 at 11:01 AM, quoth Dan Davison:
> > I know next to nothing about the technicalities of email, and
> > although this basically seems to work, I've got lots of questions
> > about sending and sorting incoming mail, and I'd be interested in
> > knowing how others recommend dealing with this situation.
>
> Pretty much the same way. Although unless you want to keep your mail
> on their IMAP server for some other reason, chances are that you'll be
> MUCH happier if you pull all your mail and store it locally on your
> laptop (e.g. using fetchmail or getmail) rather than keep it on their
> server. That will make browsing through your mail archives MUCH
> faster, and certainly more reliable. On the other hand, if you need to
Right, thanks to the people who told me to stop using mutt to retrieve
email. I've now got getmail retrieving from the imap server, and
procmail sorting incoming mail into different maildirs. So, as you
predicted, that's much better. I've got a few questions at the moment:
1. I've aliased mutt to mutt -y. That start up screen is really helpful, but
1a) How do I return to it after I've entered a particular maildir? At
the moment I'm hitting q and restarting mutt...
1b) Sometimes maildirs have an 'N' next to them to indicate new mail,
but at other times there is no 'N' despite having new mail. Can anyone
enlighten me about this?
2. I've set up a key to run getmail:
macro generic G \
<shell-escape>'getmail'<enter> \
'Run getmail'
But it's a bit ugly to have to do this to check for new mail; mutt
temporarily disappears then I get a message saying 'press any key to
continue'. It all seems a bit 1980s. Do you have recommendations for a
nice way to get getmail to check for mail constantly in the
background, and mutt to recognise when getmail has deposited new mail?
I can think of some ways (cron job, backgrounded daemon-like process),
but I thought there might be a standard solution.
Thanks a lot,
DAn
> be able to read your email without needing your laptop handy, then
> obviously that's not a workable solution.
>
> > When I'm at home, if I leave mutt running for a few minutes, it
> > invariably becomes unresponsive.
>
> Ugh. Well, my first guess would be that your school's IMAP server has
> a shockingly low timeout (the standard length is 30 minutes), such
> that when mutt tries to check for mail again, mutt doesn't realize
> that the IMAP server already closed the connection. The solution would
> be to use a lower $timeout value, so that mutt checks for new mail
> *MORE* frequently, so that their IMAP server doesn't consider you
> MIA..
>
> Another thought is that your school's IMAP server may not be
> implementing the IDLE command correctly; try unsetting $imap_idle in
> your muttrc.
>
> ~Kyle
> --
> Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
> -- Oscar Wilde