[Dovecot] Disconnect IMAP session after certain time?

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 17:21 +0100, Jan-Piet Mens wrote:
> Is it possible to have Dovecot cleanly terminate an IMAP
> session after a certain time? I have a number of users
> who leave their MUA (Mozilla Thunderbird) on all night,
> and I'd like to have them (cleanly) disconnect in order
> to free up resources after a certain "inactivity" time
> (e.g. 2 hours).
> 
> Can that be done?

You could probably write a plugin to do that, but I think that's a bad
idea. I'd hate if I had to reconnect to IMAP server every single
morning. Besides have you checked that the clients won't just reconnect
automatically? Does it really even free all that much resources, and
what are you going to do with them in night time anyway?

Detecting the inactivity can also be difficult. It's not real
inactivity, because Dovecot disconnects the client if it hasn't said
anything for 30 minutes. So you'd have to start guessing which commands
mean that there's a user in there reading mails and which commands just
mean that Thunderbird is doing its internal things automatically.