Re: mailbox close while accessing exchange over imap

[Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Friday, November 30 at 02:37 PM, quoth Jason Joines:
> 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.

Heh, there's a shock: a Microsoft product that plays fast and loose 
with the IMAP spec.

> 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.

Indeed, it probably isn't. Seriously, if you can fake it to hide the 
network latency, why bother the user with such pithy details? Mutt 
only does so because it believes in being more honest about what's 
really going on rather than in providing a pleasant illusion. ;) 
(That's one way of putting it, anyway---another would be WYSIWYH.)

> 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?

For mutt 1.4.x? Correct. That feature has been added to the 
development version of mutt (1.5.x) and will be in the next stable 
mutt (1.6), whenever that comes out.

> 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.

I guess my first instinct would be to use a *really* low 
imap_keepalive (like 60), and maybe a timeout value of 1 or something  
similarly silly and see if that helps.

If it doesn't, I'd be curious to try compiling mutt with debugging 
enabled (reconfigure with --enable-debug) and then run it with a -d2 
argument. That will cause it to log (in ~/.muttdebug0) the entire IMAP 
conversation, so you can see exactly what's going on. If the previous 
attempts to fix the problem didn't work, my guess would be that mutt 
is using the IMAP NOOP command to keep the connection alive, and 
Exchange is not recognizing that as something that keeps the 
connection alive. But that's just a guess---the log of the IMAP 
connection would tell you for certain. At that point you can probably 
easily figure out what mutt is doing and who's doing something wrong. 
Chances are there's little you can do to really fix the problem, but 
it's better to know what the problem is for sure first!

~Kyle
- -- 
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher 
regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
                                                           -- Nietzsche
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