Re: New imap Implementation and Keepalive

[Frank Schmitt <ich@frank-schmitt.net>]

Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk> writes:

> On 9/23/2010 3:42 AM, Charles Philip Chan wrote:
>>
>> Firstly I want to thank everyone involved for the speedup in the new
>> imap implementation. However, I am encountering one annoying problem- it
>> seems like the new implementation does not keep the connection alive
>> like the old one does. In the old implementation I just need to enter my
>> imap password once interactively per Gnus session (I wasn't using
>> auth-sources at that time). With the new implementation my imaps server
>> (dovecot) drops connection due to inactivity and I need to enter my long
>> gpg passphrase again if my pass phrase cache have expired.
>
> I think it is a bit unkind to keep IMAP sessions alive just for the
> sake of it. The mail server administrators set their time-out policies
> to make the best possible use of resources.  If everybody forcibly
> keeps their sessions alive, the mail servers are likely to run out of
> connections and refuse new connections.
>
> If the problem is really that the password cache is expiring, it is
> far better to block that instead of trying to tax the mail server.

No. For IMAP it is perfectly normal that the client keeps the connection
open as long as he is active. It's even in the RFC. Otherwise e.g. IMAP
idle wouldn't be possible. The NOOP command is there for exactly this purpose.

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