Bug 242598

Summary: New mail check on an IMAP account (Gmail) sometimes halts
Product: [Unmaintained] kmail Reporter: Gareth <kdebugs>
Component: IMAPAssignee: kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED    
Severity: normal CC: gregap
Priority: NOR    
Version: 1.13.3   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Ubuntu   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Gareth 2010-06-23 15:04:51 UTC 
Version:           4.4.3 (using KDE 4.4.4) 
OS:                Linux

When Kontact runs a check on an IMAP (Gmail) account for new mnessages, the progress indicator is stopped at some point along its progress and access to that account is impossible (using the "abort" button does nothing), requiring a restart of Kontact before access to that account is possible.

Admittedly this seems to occur for accounts when bandwidth is lacking (i.e. a local mail server never has this problem) so it may be related to an IMAP timeout issue; i.e. Kontact does not drop and retry to connect but sits infinitely waiting for a response that never comes. This is just my best guess however.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
The only possible way to reproduce this (and this is a guess as I am not entirely sure what could cause it) would be to have an IMAP account over a very low bandwidth/highly utilised Internet connection that could cause data to stop and the IMAP server connection to timeout.

Actual Results:  
The check new messages status for an account stops its progress and cannot be aborted or access to that account restored without a restart of Kontact.

Expected Results:  
If a connection goes dormant for a specific time, close connection forcefully and attempt to reconnect again. Alternatively, ensure that the Abort button does force an IMAP connection close.
Comment 1 Gregor Petrin 2012-11-26 10:28:45 UTC 
I can confirm this also happens regularly on my work machine with a reasonably fast & stable internet connection, and not just with GMail accounts. Most often it is stuck while syncing a folder but I have also seen it stick while 'establishing connection'. Most of these folder do not contain massive amounts of email and also very rarely get new messages. Sometimes it hangs on folders where the oldest message is more than 2 years old so it's definitely not the case of massive attachments being downloaded. Could there not be a timeout added to stop syncing a folder if nothing got transferred for a certain period?

In my case, what works is going into settings -> configure kmail -> accounts -> <specific account> -> modify and then clicking OK. This seems to reset that account. The problem is made worse as KMail does not notify users that something went wrong (because obviously it thinks nothing is wrong) so I have sometimes missed important emails until it was too late.
Comment 2 Laurent Montel 2015-04-12 10:11:40 UTC 
Thank you for taking the time to file a bug report.

KMail2 was released in 2011, and the entire code base went through significant changes. We are currently in the process of porting to Qt5 and KF5. It is unlikely that these bugs are still valid in KMail2.

We welcome you to try out KMail 2 with the KDE 4.14 release and give your feedback.