Do I need idled on or not?

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Quoting Murray Trainer <mtrainer at central-data.net>:

> Hi All,
>
> I noticed the line in cyrus.conf below which was commented previously
> and now included in SuSE 10.0:
>
> # this is only necessary if using idled for IMAP IDLE
> idled         cmd="idled"
>
> The IMAP IDLE feature sounds like a good idea - do any mail clients
> support it yet.  If so I will probably leave it on.  Does this mean I
> can tell my e-mail clients using IMAP not to check for new mail?

I believe for IDLE to work, mail client needs to be connected to that 
particular folder (one folder, one connection).  If all you are 
interested is your INBOX, and you are sure your mail client dedicates 
one connection only for INBOX, then I guess you fine with IDLE only.  
If you have hundreds of folders and you want to be notified of changes 
in all of them, then you'd probably want to poll from time to (since 
mail clients will usually keep only handfull of connections to IMAP 
server).

Also, if you are laptop user, there might be some other concerns.  For 
example, when your laptop goes to standby, mail client will loose 
connection to IMAP server.  Likewise when IMAP server is restarted.  
Thunderbird is really bad in handling those.

As for support in clients, I know for sure that Thunderbird uses IDLE 
by default.  Since I enabled idled on my Cyrus box, I bumped check 
interval to about 30 mins, but haven't turned it off completely.  Just 
to be on the safe side knowing how badly Thunderbird handles cases when 
it gets disconnected from IMAP server.


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