mailbox close while accessing exchange over imap
I'm using Mutt 1.4.2.3i on Linux and accessing mail via IMAP on a
microsoft exchange 6.5 server. I started with all the default settings
other than a few personal preferences such as name and color. If I
leave Mutt open to the list of messages and don't do anything for a
while, I end up with an empty list and the messages "no mailbox" and
"Mailbox closed" in the last two lines of the screen. It seems the
timeout was occurring at around 15 minutes, I logged it by checking for
active imap connection to that server by Mutt every 60s via netstat.
I tried timeout values of 0 and 15 but had the same problem. Then I
commented out the timeout setting and tried imap_keepalive=600 and went
to lunch. When I got back it had been over 40 minutes and netstat still
showed Mutt with an active IMAP connection. However, the client still
had the same problem, an empty message list and the messages "no
mailbox" and "Mailbox closed".
The reason I'm working on this in the first place is someone else
reported the same problem with an imap_keepalive=300. So, I set up Mutt
to connect to the same exchange server and another instance of Mutt to
connect to a Courier IMAP 4.1.3 server that I maintain. There have been
no problems with the connection to the Courier server just using Mutt's
default settings.
I normally use Thunderbird 2.0 to connect to the same exchange
server and have no problems. However, Thunderbird keeps the message
index and headers on local disk even for IMAP mail so it just might not
be letting me know that the mailbox is being closed by the server. From
the way Mutt reports "Fetching message headers" at startup while it
counts through all the messages in my inbox and then displays an empty
list when the mailbox goes away, I'm guessing it does not store any sort
of index on disk for IMAP messages. Is that correct?
Any suggestions for other client side tweaks to help with this
problem? I don't administer the exchange server and getting those who
do to even reveal any settings, much less change them, will be a nightmare.
Jason
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