Re: nnimap-keepalive

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net> writes:

> Aloha everyone,
>
> I ran into a problem which apparently has history. I'm
> spending a month at my son's house and his internet setup
> doesn't do well with persistent IMAP connections. So if I
> don't do anything with my IMAP connection for a little while,
> and then try something, nnimap hangs (I can point out the
> precise spot but I assume this is well known already).
>
> Hence nnimap-keepalive. But that's hardwired to run every 15
> minutes and check for lack of activity in the past 5
> minutes. You can see the problem already, and in fact I found
> an old discussion thread suggesting the keepalive time should
> be configurable.
>
> By hacking nnimap.el I changed it to a 1 minute run interval
> and a 1 minute idle check, and now there is no problem with
> hanging. However being largely ignorant of things gnu and
> IMAP, I don't know if there is a dark side to this. Probably
> so.

I've opened bug#47478 for this, with a patch. It adds a new
`nnimap-keepalive-times' option, which you can use to set both interval
and inactivity, or you can set it to nil to disable the keepalive
altogether.

I don't see any particular downside to running the keepalive more
frequently. Obviously it's more network traffic, but such a tiny bit
more I can't imagine it would make any difference. This patch also sets
`nnimap-streaming' to t during the keepalive, so we don't wait for a
response.

Eric