Subject: IDLE support problem

From: Ere Maijala <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 19:17:38 +0300

Hello,

My server is running UW imapd 2003.338rh. I just noticed a problem with 
the IDLE command. It seems that if there are two connections to the 
server, and one of them has for example INBOX selected and in IDLE mode, 
another connection can't gain read-write access to the INBOX. No kiss of 
death is issued on the IDLE connection. Is this deliberate? I forgot a 
mail client running at home when I went to work, and wasn't able to 
process my mails there because the system at home had a couple of 
mailboxes selected and IDLE.

Ere
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/imap/c-client-list.html
------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 10:53:31 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Ere Maijala wrote:
> My server is running UW imapd 2003.338rh. I just noticed a problem with the 
> IDLE command. It seems that if there are two connections to the server, and 
> one of them has for example INBOX selected and in IDLE mode, another 
> connection can't gain read-write access to the INBOX. No kiss of death is 
> issued on the IDLE connection. Is this deliberate?

I can't reproduce this problem with unmodified UW imapd; kiss of death 
works fine with IDLE for me.

Please try unmodified UW imapd and see if that works for you.  If so, that 
would suggest that the problem is in Redhat's distribution.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

---

From: Ere Maijala <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:13:55 +0300

Mark Crispin wrote:
>> My server is running UW imapd 2003.338rh. I just noticed a problem 
>> with the IDLE command. It seems that if there are two connections to 
>> the server, and one of them has for example INBOX selected and in IDLE 
>> mode, another connection can't gain read-write access to the INBOX. No 
>> kiss of death is issued on the IDLE connection. Is this deliberate?
> 
> 
> Please try unmodified UW imapd and see if that works for you.  If so, 
> that would suggest that the problem is in Redhat's distribution.

Sorry, it was my fault. I tried with unmodified imapd 2004 RC7, but 
still had the problem. Turned out I wasn't reading the network capture 
carefully. The connection was dropped correctly, but my mail client 
reconnected immediately and selected INBOX again. This would cause 
problems for the other process trying to get the lock, right?

Ere

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 09:23:20 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Ere Maijala wrote:
> Sorry, it was my fault. I tried with unmodified imapd 2004 RC7, but still had 
> the problem. Turned out I wasn't reading the network capture carefully. The 
> connection was dropped correctly, but my mail client reconnected immediately 
> and selected INBOX again. This would cause problems for the other process 
> trying to get the lock, right?

Indeed it would.  If the other process got the lock, it would be stolen 
away from it right away.  Or, if the other process hadn't yet gotten it 
yet (an unlikely timing race) before the reconnection seized it, it 
wouldn't know about the reconnection.

Either way, it loses.

Sounds like a very unfriendly client.

-- Mark --

---

From: Sebastian Hagedorn <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2004 18:36:43 +0200

-- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]> is rumored to have mumbled on 

> Sounds like a very unfriendly client.

That depends on your point of view ... Mulberry behaves that way, because 
it assumes that a dial-up connection was interrupted or some stupid NAT box 
timed out. Too many users complained that they had to manually reconnect 
under those circumstances.

IMO, the real solution to the problem is to switch to mbx mailbox format, 
because it can handle concurrent sessions.
--
Sebastian Hagedorn
Ehrenfeldgürtel 156, 50823 Köln, Germany
http://www.spinfo.uni-koeln.de/~hgd/

"Being just contaminates the void" - Robyn Hitchcock