[Alpine-info] Alpine and Gmail issues

[Mark Crispin]

Thunderbird is not an IMAP client.  It is a glorified POP client that
babbles IMAP protocol.  It only uses IMAP to synchronize a local copy of
your email.  Check your hard drive -- all your messages are copied there!
Just lovely if your laptop ever goes missing (or your borrow a computer to
read your mail)...all your mail is there for whomever uses the computer
afterwards.  [Don't believe the claims that "it's OK, the files are
deleted and your email is safe"; there is an entire industry based upon
that NOT being true.  Do you really believe that deleting your cookies
hides where you've been browsing???]

Alpine is an IMAP client.  It does not keep a local copy of your email on
your hard drive; it only maintains an in-memory cache of the open IMAP
connection state.  This state is in RAM only, and is abolished when the
connection is disconnected.

Since this in-memory cache is NOT a complete image of your mail, but only
of that part that you looked at in the session, there is nothing
meaningful to save and resynchronize.  The only useful thing to do is to
start over.

Alpine does keep the connection open, and even sends the server regular
pings to assure the server that the client is still there and wants to
keep the session alive.  You can ask yourself why Gmail kills the session.

Now, it may be reasonable for Alpine to have a feature that does an
automatic "<" then ">" if the server breaks the connection.  My own guess
is that such a feature would turn out to be far more annoying than
beneficial.  But go ahead and ask the re-alpine folks to add it to their
suggestion list.

On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Tim K. (Gmane) wrote:

> Hello. Why is Alpine having such a hard time keeping an open INBOX

> against the Gmail IMAP servers? If the connection breaks for whatever

> reason, can't Alpine just try to re-establish it? Is there a setting

> somewhere that I am missing? Thunderbird seems to work seamlessly even

> though I do realize the Gmail IMAP servers are flaky or they decide to

> close the connections for whatever reasons.

>

> Any tips to improve the Alpine experience with Gmail? I'm on Alpine 2.00

> on Linux, if it matters. I don't have a problem applying patches or

> running a custom build if there are any fixes available.

>

> Thank you.

>

> --

> Tim

>

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-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
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