[maemo-developers] modest/tinymail imap idle test available

[From: David Fries]

I've put together a set of tinymail/modest patches to support imap
idle mode.  That's where the server can notify the client of mail
changes in the currently selected mailbox (this also selects the inbox
if you aren't in another folder).  See bug 3888 for more history.

IMAP-IDLE
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3888

In short tinymail supports idle, but turns it into a polling operation
where a thread would wake up every second or two and check for more
data.  Nokia has it disabled as shipped in the N900, due to the
battery drain.  This rather large set of changes adds proper blocking
to idle based on a three year old patch, and hooks up the
notifications for when idle has new mail.  With this change, idle only
makes four system calls every time the server sends an idle keep
alive.  For me that's 4.5 minutes and is set that way because of T-Mobile
IPv4 NAT's 5 minute timeout before it kills the connection.  I don't
think you can take any less power and still get e-mail.  That said
it's a large set of patches and could use some more testing.

To give it a try, compile and run both tinymail and modest, then try
e-mailing yourself.  Tinymail doesn't expose an idle enable or
disable, so it's either compiled in and enabled or disabled at compile
time, so there isn't any configuration changes to start using it.

https://gitorious.org/~dfries/community-ssu/dfriess-tinymail/commits/force_online
https://gitorious.org/~dfries/community-ssu/dfriess-community_ssu_modest/commits/idle_work

Unfortunately tinymail's current multithreaded lock system is prone to
deadlocks, and while I've found and fixed a bunch it's likely there
are more lurking, if you find any, patches are welcome.  I'll only try
to debug reports which include a set of reproducible steps.  The
majority of the deadlocks are related to connecting and getting
disconnected and being online but having the server down.  They result
is the account being stuck in refreshing and requires killing the
modest executables.

-- 
David Fries <david at fries.net>    PGP pub CB1EE8F0
http://fries.net/~david/