Javamail API not reporting timeout

Question

Hi,
I'm writing a POP3 application which pulls mails
from a mail server processes them and then deletes
them from the server.
Occasionally the processing takes a while and the connection
with the mailserver may timeout. This is fine because if I know
its timed out, I could reconnect and find the mail and delete it.
However what is happening is that the connection is timing out but the javamail api gives me no indication of this. The folder and store objects both report that they are open. Even if I use a connectionListener it tells me nothing.
Now even this might not be a problem if the next oeration where to fail, as the same thing occurs in the transport object, however when I attempt to send it fails and closes the transport.
However with the store I mark a message as deleted and then close, and it gives no exceptions letting me think I have successfully deleted a message, whereas in reality the underlying socket connection was closed and the message is still on the server.
I have tried this several times looking at both the debug output on the mail server and from the javamail api.
Is this a bug I should report or is there something I'm missing
It seems pretty bad that javamail allows me to delete a message on a connection that is closed and not throw an exception.
All ideas/suggestions welcome?
Failing this does anyone know how to get the javamail api to send a NOOP
command to keep the connection open.
-vinnie

Answer 1

I have been setting my timeouts manually.
Properties props = System.getProperties();
props.put("mail.imap.timeout",timeoutVal);
props.put("mail.imap.connectiontimeout",timeoutVal);
Session session = Session.getInstance(props,null);
mail.pop3.timeout and mail.pop3.connectiontimeout are what you would want to use. Something else you might want to try is doing a Folder.getMessageCount() or some other low overhead transaction to keep the connection alive.