problems with Microsoft Outlook (Exchange?) timing out

[Eric Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

Hi,

I had the misfortune of having our work email system transferred 
over to Microsoft Live last year.  Not wanting to use Outlook or 
OWA, I continue to use gnus, accessing my Live email using 
IMAP.  Generally, this works okay.

It would seem that the IMAP connection to Outlook gets dropped 
(times out?) too soon in many cases while reading and writing 
emails.  This affects accessing emails when reading a group every 
so often (and I think this has come up before in the mailing list 
here).  I have learnt to live with the annoying behaviour 
generally. 

However, there is one case where I am having a serious problem.  I 
have one group (large volume) in which I am now unable to exit the 
group properly.  The problem is that when I exit, gnus attempts to 
expire a large number of messages.  In the process, I think 
Outlook drops the connection so I get the following behaviour 
(from *Messages*):

,---- | Expiring articles...  | Expiring articles from general: ( 
[lots of message numbers omitted for brevety] ) | Opening 
connection to pod51002.outlook.com via tls...  | Opening 
connection to pod51002.outlook.com...done | nnimap-send-command: 
Buffer  *nnimap pod51002.outlook.com nil  *nntpd**-46420 has no 
process `----  I have tried visiting this group (general) several 
times over the past week and have not been able to "quit" the 
group normally.  I am attempting to expire just over 3000 emails.

Any suggestions?  Is there something that could be done in gnus to 
re-open connections to outlook.com when the connection is lost?  I 
am happy to debug as necessary, given suitable instruction ;-) 

My gnus is up to date from git master as of yesterday.

Thanks,
eric

-- 
: Eric S Fraga, GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D
: in Emacs 24.3.50.1 + Ma Gnus v0.6
: BBDB version 3.02 ($Date: 2012/09/15 14:41:47 $)