Re: mailbox close while accessing exchange over imap
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: mailbox close while accessing exchange over imap
From: Jason Joines <joines@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: mutt-users@xxxxxxxx
Date: Fri Nov 30 14:37:52 2007
I'm using Mutt 1.4.2.3i on Linux and accessing mail via IMAP on a
microsoft exchange 6.5 server. I started with all the default
settings other than a few personal preferences such as name and
color. If I leave Mutt open to the list of messages and don't do
anything for a while, I end up with an empty list and the messages "no
mailbox" and "Mailbox closed" in the last two lines of the screen. It
seems the timeout was occurring at around 15 minutes, I logged it by
checking for active imap connection to that server by Mutt every 60s
via netstat.
I tried timeout values of 0 and 15 but had the same problem. Then
I commented out the timeout setting and tried imap_keepalive=600 and
went to lunch. When I got back it had been over 40 minutes and
netstat still showed Mutt with an active IMAP connection. However,
the client still had the same problem, an empty message list and the
messages "no mailbox" and "Mailbox closed".
The reason I'm working on this in the first place is someone else
reported the same problem with an imap_keepalive=300. So, I set up
Mutt to connect to the same exchange server and another instance of
Mutt to connect to a Courier IMAP 4.1.3 server that I maintain. There
have been no problems with the connection to the Courier server just
using Mutt's default settings.
I normally use Thunderbird 2.0 to connect to the same exchange
server and have no problems. However, Thunderbird keeps the message
index and headers on local disk even for IMAP mail so it just might
not be letting me know that the mailbox is being closed by the
server. From the way Mutt reports "Fetching message headers" at
startup while it counts through all the messages in my inbox and then
displays an empty list when the mailbox goes away, I'm guessing it
does not store any sort of index on disk for IMAP messages. Is that
correct?
Any suggestions for other client side tweaks to help with this
problem? I don't administer the exchange server and getting those who
do to even reveal any settings, much less change them, will be a
nightmare.
Jason
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I did a bit more checking. With the imap_keepalive=600 option, the
IMAP TCP connection itself seems to stay open indefinitely via netstat.
The client then gets the "mailbox closed" message right at 30 minutes
after the last activity.
Jason
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