Unfortunately, problems such as these are almost invariably network
related and have little/nothing to do with IMAP.
Once logged in, the only timeout in IMAP is a 30 minute inactivity
autologout timer.
One of the biggest offenders is NAT. Many NAT devices drop the mapping if
there has not been client traffic in an "reasonable" interval, in the
assumption that HTTP is the only protocol that anyone uses. Their
defintion of "reasonable" can be a low as a few seconds.
This interacts unfavorably with IMAP's IDLE feature, whose entire purpose
in life is to quell frequent client traffic when the client has nothing to
do, in favor of server traffic when there is new mail. If the victimized
clients tend to be Outlook and not Alpine, then IDLE is implicated.
Last but not least, Outlook itself has a ridiculously small client
timeout; find that slider and make sure that it is set to the (still
ridiculously small) maxium.
In an extreme case, edit out the IDLE support in imapd. That may get the
mobile device clients annoyed at you, but c'est la vie...
On Thu, 13 Mar 2008, Andrew Daviel wrote:
I have a report from a user that if they use mail from home in the evening,
when the cable modem network is busy, that writing a copy of messages to
their sent-folder via IMAP often fails, and that there
are other timeouts too. If they try later at night, when it's not so busy,
they don't have a problem. Apparently it's so frustrating that they've been
using rdesktop to a Windows machine at work then IMAP over the LAN.
I think I'd heard of this before, but when I've tried briefly myself (same
ISP network) it has "worked for me". (I normally ssh to work then use Pine
on my desktop, rather than Thunderbird to the main server).
Any suggestions on what to look for ? I see some anti-flood settings in
xinetd.conf, but don't recall any timeout settings.
--
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376 (Pacific Time)
Network Security Manager
_______________________________________________
Imap-uw mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
_______________________________________________
Imap-uw mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
