On Aug 13, 2008, at 4:59 PM, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
One thing that would be nice, that pretty much no webmail does, is
to keep a stateful connection open all the time (or at least some
of the time) instead of creating tons of short-lived connections
that ask the same stuff over and over again. With a stateful
connection you could basically run IDLE and wait for changes there
instead of asking all the time "is there new mail?" "is there new
mail now?" "what about now?".I've seen several messages on the list that seem to indicate some
clients don't maintain the connection. It will be interesting to
see what the implications of this. Not sure if it can be done from
a HTTP connection as it is suppose to be stateless.
It doesn't have to rely on a stateful HTTP connection. You already
most likely use some server-stored state based on cookies/whatever. So
among that server state you could also keep the opened IMAP
connection. I guess the main issue here is that it doesn't work all
that nicely if the HTTP requests get redirected to different servers
randomly.