nnimap hangs on a bad server

nnimap hangs on a bad server

[Artem Baguinski]

hello

i have such a bad connection: now and then it's dropped and various
applications suffer from it. one of the connection types that keeps
disappearing is connection to my primary imap server. 

for a short time i tried to use pine and never really noticed that
connection disappears, then MozillaThunderbird and it kept saying:
"server has closed the connection" and finally GNUS and it simply
hangs now and then. my switching the mail/news reader had nothing to
do with this problem, i was looking for the one that acts like i want
and it seems to me gnus is the one. except for this annoying hanging. 

i guess it's not gnus'es fault [ssh constantly disconnects saying
"connection reset by peer" if i don't attend it for some time and as
i said thunderbird was constantly complaining as well]. but still
it's very frustrating to have to kill emacs if typing the article
took too long. 

is there a way to set some "timeout" afterwhich gnus would reconnect,
or somehting?

+ offtopic: if you know how to fix the cause, i'll appreciate it even
more...

-- 
gr{oe|ee}t{en|ings}
artm