Re: Unexpected network error
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On Friday, September 26 at 12:39 PM, quoth Ravi Uday:
>> That's awfully small. You can make them bigger (e.g. timeout=300,
>> imap_keepalive=60, or even larger). I know the man page makes it sound
>> like timeout really needs to be extra small, but don't sweat it. The
>> default is 600, and you generally don't really need it anywhere near
>> as small as 15. Think about that: that's potentially checking your
>> email every 15 seconds. Depending on the number of mailboxes you have
>
> Well 600 is damn big, check your emails every 10mins !! How did
> you(they) arrive at this number?
Generally, over IMAP, the *best* way to do it is to use IMAP's IDLE
extension. What happens is that the IMAP server will *notify* you when
you get mail, rather than having you constantly ask it "now? how about
now? now? now? what about now?", and mutt fully supports the IDLE
feature (better than some IMAP servers do, actually).
Anyway, I don't know where the 10 minute default came from in the
beginning, but I think it's quite reasonable.
> Outlook does it every 20 secs or lesser.
No, I'm afraid you're mistaken.
http://email.about.com/od/outlookexpresstips/qt/et052206.htm says:
Decide on how often you want Windows Mail or Outlook Express to
look for new mail. Typical values are between 10 and 60 minutes.
www.outlook-tips.net/beginner/autosr.htm says:
You should not check it more often than every 8 -10 min because it
creates too much load on your mail server and a large amount of
mail will cause some versions of Outlook to hang if it is still
downloading mail when the next automatic mail pass starts.
I also just loaded up my copy of VirtualBox to check out Microsoft
Outlook 2000 myself. The default setting for new accounts is to check
for new messages every 10 minutes, and it's *impossible* to change
that setting to less than 1 minute (you can see a screen shot of the
dialog box here: http://www.memoryhole.net/~kyle/outlook.png - note
the "Check for new messages every" config option in the center of the
dialog box).
> And its better to get your mails fast then wait for 10mins..
Ummm, okay... I think if someone has something that important to say,
they should use a medium other than email (such as the phone). Email
transmission can easily introduce delays of several minutes, long
before you even have the chance to receive it.
> Since I use mutt in a corporate n/w, it doesnt matter if its
> 10secs/20secs.
The speed of your network doesn't matter. What matters is the load and
response time of your IMAP server. I know mail admins (good ones) that
have warned their users against checking mail more often than every 5
minutes, despite the fact that most of their clients use a full-duplex
100 Base-T ethernet connection to connect to the server (and some use
gigabit). It's not necessarily the bandwidth, but also the disk I/O -
when you've got 20+ people all checking their entire folder
hierarchies constantly, that can kill your server.
Just as an experiment, see how long it takes for the following command
to kill your computer (or just imagine it; trust me, your computer
will quickly become unusable):
while true; do find $HOME >/dev/null & done
...or, even more fun:
while true; do
find $HOME -type f -exec tail {} \; >/dev/null &
done
Now, granted, there are ways that you may be able to mitigate the
problem, and let's not get into questions of how powerful and/or
efficient and/or well-configured your mail server is. The fact of the
matter is: checking your mail that quickly (every few seconds) over
and over again is not only uncommon, but generally a really bad
idea---even on a corporate network.
If you really MUST have your mail that fast (assuming your IMAP server
doesn't support the IDLE command), then a better option would be to
have your email forwarded to your local computer as it comes in, so
you can check your inbox as often as you want without causing anyone
else any trouble.
~Kyle
- --
No one loves armed missionaries.
-- Maximilien Robespierre
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