Re: imap connections never being closed?

[Elias Oltmanns <eo@nebensachen.de>]

(2013-08-01) Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:
>> If the computer is put to sleep and/or moved to a different network,
>> open IMAP connections seems to be stuck.
> 
> Yes, but quitting Gnus kills off all the buffers Gnus has made, so all
> connections should be killed at that point.

At least on emacs 23.3.1, quitting gnus is not even possible in these
situations. My piece of advice is this:

(defadvice nnimap-close-server (around dont-ping)
  (let ((imap-ping-server nil))
    ad-do-it))

Since I cannot test ma gnus or emacs 24.3 right now, here is the
behaviour I'm seeing---that is, not any more:
1. Open gnus and an encrypted imap connection to some remote server.
2. Cutt off the connection to the internet (shut down wlan in my case).
3. Press `q' in the group buffer. Gnus will hang at that point. Pressing
   `C-g' unfreezes emacs but leaves me int he gorup buffer, i.e. gnus
   remains active. Alternatively, killing the gnutls-cli / openssl
   process from a terminal unfreezes emacs as well und actually shuts
   down gnus.

With the hack above, quitting gnus will still hang, but pressing `C-g'
won't return to the group buffer but complete shutdown instead. Also,
setting nnimap-logout-timeout works as expected now.

Of course, the tcp approach discussed elsewhere has a much wider scope,
as would have a generic timeout based solution. Still, I wonder whether
a simple patch to nnimap-close-server would be a start to spare at least
some users' nerves. That is, if the situation in emacs 24.3 is still as
annoying as described above.

Hope that helped a bit,

Elias