[Alpine-info] Very slow IMAP CHECK

[Steve Hubert]

On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Chris Wilson wrote:


> Checkpoint: 12:44:50.286490  Since 1st change: 302 secs  idle: 16 secs

> tcptimeout: waited 15 seconds

> tcptimeout: waited 30 seconds

> IMAP 12:45:30 3/16 mm_log babble: Check completed.

>

> I haven't yet found a way to disable the use of the CHECK command. The

> IMAP documentation doesn't make it clear what its purpose is or why it

> actually needs to be run at all. Alpine seems to provide no way to disable

> or control it. Does anyone have any ideas before I patch my alpine to

> disable it completely?

>

> Cheers, Chris.


The reason that alpine does the CHECK command is to sync the folder to 
disk periodically, but since the IMAP documentation is vague it may be 
that servers don't need the CHECK call or that the CHECK call does 
something else (like check the validity of the mailbox, say).

The alpine call is pine_mail_check. You could easily disable it completely 
there. The periodic call to pine_mail_check comes from

   new_mail()
     check_point()
       pine_mail_check()

You could modify the check_point() routine to slow it down instead of 
turning it off completely.

Steve