Another stab at IMAP IDLE

[Leon Bogaert]

I'm very interested in this too. I would be glad to help a hand. By
testing or 
by coding pieces of it.

Regards,
Leon

Ethan Glasser-Camp <glasse <at> cs.rpi.edu> writes:

> 
> Hi list,
> 
> IMAP IDLE was implemented in OfflineIMAP once a long time ago, but it 
> relied on imaplib2 instead of imaplib, and this was apparently a
source 
> of stability issues for some users, so IDLE was dropped, as was 
> imaplib2. For more on this exciting story, see episode 12:
> 
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.bugs.general/600086
> 
> When last we left our heroes[0], alternatives in order to support
IMAP 
> IDLE were:
> 
> 1. add IDLE support to imaplib.
> 
> 2. fix the bugs in imaplib2.
> 
> 3. port OfflineIMAP over to something else entirely, for example 
> Twisted's IMAP library.
> 
> [0] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.offlineimap.general/1662
> 
> Twisted's IMAP library doesn't support IDLE yet either, so that's 
> probably the hardest of the three options. And considering that Piers 
> Lauder is the author of both imaplib and imaplib2, I think the best 
> implementation of imaplib + IDLE is likely to be imaplib2. So that 
> leaves us with choice 2 as the best way forward for IMAP support in 
> Python. This means fixing bugs in multithreaded code, which I'm not 
> crazy about, but I really want IDLE support!
> 
> Based on this rationale I decided to de-revert the commits that
removed 
> IMAP IDLE from offlineimap, and merge in a new version of imaplib2. I 
> have run it a few times successfully, but it's still a work in
progress. 
> If you're interested, it's the readd-idle branch of my github fork of 
> offlineimap.
> 
> https://github.com/glasserc/offlineimap/tree/readd-idle
> 
> Ethan
> 
> P.S. As it happens, I believe based on cursory examination of the
source 
> that at least some of the bugs people experienced with imaplib2 have 
> been fixed. For example, Debian bug 536329 includes a patch that
appears 
> to be applied to imaplib2, and Debian bug 536156, about zero-length 
> messages, may be addressed by "0 read detection" which was added to 
> imaplib2 in June 2010. Which leaves "Sync hangs without any kind of 
> error message". There's a message that "Improved timeout handling"
was 
> added to imaplib2 in October 2010, and I'm definitely seeing
connections 
> time out, but I don't think it's solved entirely.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> OfflineIMAP-project mailing list
> OfflineIMAP-project <at> lists.alioth.debian.org
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/offlineimap-project
> 
> OfflineIMAP homepage: http://software.complete.org/offlineimap
> 
>