Nevis Stuck Mail Reader

Some tips on how to handle a stuck mail reader.

Some common problems with reading mail are:

A long time passes without receiving any new mail message, even ones that you send to yourself.

The mail reader seems "stuck": it takes a long time (several minutes) to access the contents of your INBOX or any mail folder.

You try to send mail, and it takes a long time; messages indicate that the mail reader is trying to save a copy in your Send folder.

Here are some things to check:

Try to login to your Nevis account. If you can't do it, or you get an error message about accessing your home directory, that's the problem: If you can't access your home directory, the mail server can't access it either.
Apart from sending a message to the systems administrator, there's not much else you can do about this issue. The machine containing your home directory may need to be rebooted.
If your home directory is available but the mail reader still appears to be stuck, the problem may be with the mail server: the IMAP server program may be stuck trying to read your mail directory information. If this is the case, try these steps:
- Quit your mail reader program. If the problem is with the IMAP access, this may take a long time. Don't force-quit or abnormally terminate the program; let it take however long it needs in order to quit.
- Delete your IMAP information folder: rm -rf ~/.imap
  In general, any .imap folder that you find among your files is a set of "bookmarks" left by the mail server's IMAP program to speed up reading your mail files. It never hurts to delete these directories, provided you're not running any mail reader program at the time you delete them. They will be reconstructed the next time the IMAP program reads your mail files.
- Start your mail reader again.
In trying to track down this problem, I came across this message. In order to prevent this issue, I suggest the following:
- A typical cause of this issue appears to be when a computer goes to sleep or otherwise disconnects while it's still running a mail reader. The IMAP process on our mail server can remain running, and loses synchronization with your mail program when it tries to connect. If you get these delays, you may want to try quitting your e-mail program before letting your laptop to go to sleep or going into suspend mode.
- Another cause may be having very large IMAP folders. In particular, people often ignore their Trash and Sent folders, which can accumulate messages without limit. You may want to consider:
  - Periodically cleaning out old messages from your Trash folder.
  - Filing or deleting messages from your Sent folder, instead of just leaving them there.
  - Some mail readers (such as Thunderbird) allow for the automatic purging of messages that are older by a given number of days. I've set my Trash folder to delete all messages older than nine months, and my Sent folder to delete all messages older than six months. (I also BCC: all the messages I send to myself, so I rarely have need for a separate Sent folder.)
  - As I've urged elsewhere, don't let your INBOX or other mail folders accumulate thousands of messages. If you have that many messages in a folder, it's time to think about creating sub-folders.
This is definitely an issue with our current IMAP server. I'd go back to our previous IMAP server, which did not have this problem... but that had another problem: occasionally scrambling mail folders. Given a choice between the two, I'll stick with the occasional stuck e-mail.

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