IMAP Idle

[Joseph Tam]

Joy <pj.netfilter at gmail.com> wrote:

>             We have implement imap idle in web mail built by us to have
> push mail feature. IMAP idle working perfectly with browser notification
> and we are happy with it but having one issue with users who close the
> browser directly and never logout in that case there are number of idle
> connection which are not in use and users are unable to login once IP wise
> connection limit is reached.
>
> Dovecot is not closing connection which are not in use, is there any
> setting available which can help me to resolve this issue.

I had much the same situation where a user signed up with a roaming
wireless carrier that assigned a new IP to the client whenever it got
passed from one access point to another.  Good fun when this person
took a bus ride through the city, leaving orphaned connections in
its wake.

The IDLE disconnection timeout is hardwired in the Dovecot code

 	http://wiki.dovecot.org/Timeouts

It's set to the RFC minimum of 30min.  You'll have to recompile Dovecot
to lower this to a non-RFC compliant value.  I'm not sure how this this
will affect clients, but 30min seems to be overly generous.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>