Subject: Outlook and IMAP: session disconnect

From: Kai Lanz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 10:54:20 -0700 (PDT)

Our Microsoft Outlook 2002 users are encountering the situation
described in the UW-IMAP FAQ:

7.19 Why did my POP or IMAP session suddenly disconnect?  The syslog
     has the message: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user=... host=...

We do see these entries in our syslog.  The FAQ gives two possible 
explanations:

1. Certain poorly-designed clients routinely open multiple sessions to 
   the same mailbox; 

2. Another cause is a background "check for new mail" task which does 
   its work by opening a POP session to server every few seconds.

Anybody know which of these is the culprit with Outlook?  Is there a work-
around that will spare these users the annoyance of the "Your IMAP server
has closed the connection" boxes? (Like a feature they can turn off to
stop Outlook from opening multiple sessions, maybe?)

--
Kai Lanz          [email-masked]
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/imap/c-client-list.html
------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Erik Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 14:15:21 -0400

> stop Outlook from opening multiple sessions, maybe?)

Hello Kai,

We have found that with Outlook, any other process opening a read-write 
connection to the same email folder will produce this error.  [I.e., it 
is problem #2.]

If you are just running a single Outlook process and nothing else 
[except your MTA] is accessing your email folders, then you will have no 
issue.  We have not found any feature in Outlook that will make it 
handle these disconnects more easily.

However, we have found that Mozilla Messenger DOES handle this situation 
very well and will automatically, and without warning dialogs, 
re-establish your IMAP connections after being broken by other processes.

-Erik Kangas

-- 

Erik Kangas, Ph.D. --- President of Lux Scientiae, Incorporated

Lux Scientiae:       1-800-441-6612        46 Central Street
FAX:                 1-413-332-0598        Somerville, Massachusetts
Cell:                1-617-596-9558        02143, United States of America
AIM/ICQ/Yahoo Chat:  Screen Name "luxsci"

[email-masked]  ---  http://luxsci.com