Mutt (IMAP) freezes when Internet connection is lost

Question

Hi all,
I'm currently using Mutt to read my mail, which is fetched using
offlineimap from Gmail. It works fine.
I'm trying to set up the same configuration on a small
netbook. Due to hard disk space constraints I prefer not to
download the mail. Instead I'm reading it directly from the
server using Mutt's own IMAP implementation.
However, this doesn't work very well. I get frequent freezes when
I loose my wireless Internet connection. Basically, Mutt becomes
completely unresponsive and I have to suspend and kill it.
You can reproduce this behaviour by simply shutting down the
Internet connection while Mutt is communicating with the IMAP
server. It waits indefinetely and pressing any key does not have
any effect.
I've tried setting different variables to avoid freezes without
any luck. Below you can have a look at my .muttrc file. Any
suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
set realname = "Foo Bar"
set reverse_name = yes
set from = [email protected]
alternates [email protected] [email protected]
set imap_user = $from
set imap_pass = "foo"
set imap_keepalive = 300
set folder = imaps://imap.gmail.com/
set spoolfile = +INBOX
set postponed = +[Gmail]/Borradores
set smtp_url = smtp://[email protected]:587/
set smtp_pass = $imap_pass
set copy = no
set certificate_file = ~/.mutt/certificates
set header_cache = ~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir = ~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set sort = threads
set sort_aux = reverse-last-date-received
set pager_index_lines = 6
set markers = no
set edit_headers = yes
set fast_reply = yes
set connect_timeout = 5
set delete = yes
set beep_new = yes
alternative_order text/plain text/html
auto_view text/html
Last edited by gammel.holte (2010-09-16 17:17:04)

Answer 1

awayand wrote:mutt would rock if it didn't have this issue and an offline feature in addition to the already existing caching feature. I got rid of mutt when I realized there was no solution to get rid of the 5 second delay when launching mutt because it insisted initiating a connection instead of just launching and letting me decide when to connect to IMAP... I would go back to mutt in a heartbeat, but I guess until this is getting fixed I am staying with firefox...
I'm using offlineimap along with mutt to achieve roughly what you want and I couldn't be happier.
Besides, I'm also using notmuch (in AUR) to get super-fast Gmail-like search.
HTH,