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gmail refusing sync several times a day

#239

Several times a day, the attached dialog pops up. The password saved in the keychain is correct. If I immediately click "ok", roughly the same dialog pops up again (except there's a counter in the message returned by gmail that is incremented).

If I wait a while and then click ok, the dialog does not pop up again and MailMate connects to gmail just fine.

If I didn't know better, I would say that MailMate polls gmail too often for its taste. However, I'm pretty sure that thanks to IMAP there's no polling involved... right?

Reported by Vincent Noel · February 24th, 2012 @ 10:38 AM

State: new
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. benny
    benny

    There is polling involved. IMAP requires an open connection to a mailbox if polling is to be avoided. Currently MailMate only does this for INBOX'es (these mailboxes are in bold in the outline). All other mailboxes are polled every 10 minutes.

    Following the link in the error message reveals that 10 minutes may be too often for Gmail.

    It is not possible to have open connections to all mailboxes (Gmail wouldn't allow that either), but I do plan to make polling more flexible/configurable.

    I have many users with Gmail, so I'm a bit surprised this is not often reported. Could you try following the Google link and do the account verification to see if that helps?

    February 24th, 2012 @ 10:56 AM

  2. Vincent Noel
    Vincent Noel

    I did the captcha confirmation thing.

    Now my gmail account in "sources" switches between a normal, connected state and "unavailable" (see attached screenshot). It does this switch every 30 seconds or so. I have also attached some output from the activity monitor for info.

    February 24th, 2012 @ 11:19 AM

  3. benny
    benny

    Based on the log it seems Gmail cuts the connection while MailMate tries to upload some messages to the [Gmail]/Trash mailbox.

    You could try taking the [Gmail]/Trash mailbox offline to see if everything else works as expected. Then look for messages with no UID (enable the UID column in the messages outline) in the Trash mailbox. These are the messages MailMate tries to upload. If they are not important then try deleting them and then take the mailbox online again.

    February 24th, 2012 @ 11:35 AM

  4. Vincent Noel
    Vincent Noel

    That worked. I had quite a lot of messages in my [Gmail]/Trash folder that needed to be uploaded (no UID). If I understand correctly what was going on, MaiMate was uploading those and Gmail cut the connection every 5 messages or so. I don't know why it did that. Most of the messages in question were spam (?), and every time Gmail re-allowed the connection a bunch of messages would get uploaded (so there was nothing wrong with the messages themselves).

    I just deleted all of the not-uploaded-yet messages and everything went back to normal.

    Don't know how to help you diagnose the problem though :-/

    Thanks!

    February 24th, 2012 @ 12:10 PM

  5. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to resolved

    Well, I understand the problem, but I'm not sure there is much I can do about it. Gmail is just not a top-of-the-shelf IMAP provider. MailMate is also not perfect, but I think I would be at MailMate 1.6 now if I could get the time back spent on Gmail and MS Exchange problems :-)

    I'm more concerned with why MailMate needed to upload these messages. I think this is related to another Gmail issue, but I'm not sure. Let me know if you notice this again and it is reproducible. I'll mark the ticket as resolved, but I still intend to improve polling behavior (unfinished but not forgotten discussion here: #221).

    February 24th, 2012 @ 12:53 PM

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