Re: gnus imap vs exchange 2007

[Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de>]

Lynbech Christian <christian.lynbech@tieto.com> writes:

> I use gnus to read my mail over imap. It works well to connect,
> authenticate and read mail but when the connection has been sitting idle
> for a while, something goes wrong when I try to reconnect, whether it is
> to read mail or just to enter a folder.

I had a similar problem. Every once in while, when trying to update
my imap group, gnus tells me that the connection is down and asks,
if I want to go offline.

After some digging, I wrote the following in my .emacs. It sends a NOOP
command every 3 minutes to every imap server, as specified by gnus
select methods. If the server is down, it attempts to reconnect.

The assumption here is, that the server enforces some kind of idle
timeout. Though I couldn't figure it out exactly.

(add-hook 'gnus-started-hook
          #'(lambda nil
              (gnus-demon-add-handler
               'nnimap-assert-connected 3 t)))

(defun nnimap-assert-connected ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((imap-ping-server t))           ;default is t anyway
    (dolist (server (cons gnus-select-method
                          gnus-secondary-select-methods))
      (when (and (eq 'nnimap (car server))
                 (not (gnus-server-opened server)))
        (gnus-remove-denial server)
        (gnus-close-server server)
        (and (gnus-open-server server)
             (message "Reconnected server %s"
                      (gnus-method-to-server server)))))))


-ap