balsa 1.4.2 config

[Lynn Kerby <lfk kerbit net>]

I must have something configured wrong or other users are way more tolerant than
I am.  I have been trying to move my mail reading activities off of the machine
that hosts my SMTP server, so I'm running balsa-1.4.2 on a RH 7.3 system.  My IMAP
server is quite old (imap-2001a-1.62.0 package on RH6.2).  I do not have TLS/SSL
setup, so I've compiled the imap server without that support.

I have a directory on the server that contains a bunch of mbox mail folders which
I want access to via IMAP (working).  At startup time, balsa asks for my password
for the mail server and then loads the directories.  I open my IMAP inbox by clicking
on it and as expected, my mail appears.  I read some mail, delete some mail, usually
remember to choose the "Mailbox->Commit Current" menu item to sync things, then go
off and do something else.  When I return to my computer, I click the "Check" icon
and balsa pops up a dialog with a bunch of messages which boil down to it telling
me the IMAP session timed out and that the mailbox is closed now.  The problem is
that it isn't closed as far as balsa is concerned as I cannot do anything with it
until I explicitly close it from the mailbox list RMB popup menu or the X on the
mailbox tab.  The even more strange thing is that if I close the mailbox after
committing as above, I get the same behavior when I try to open it later.  I'm
guessing that something is not configured right, but what?

In the Misc frame of Preferences the "Automatically close mailbox..." item is
unselected and the "Automatically commit mailbox..." item is selected with a
time of 2 minutes.  My IMAP mailboxes are *never* automatically committed.

I got no responses last time I asked about this, but it was in the midst of
a rant about the inflexibility of the IMAP client code in balsa (well, libmutt)
and was probably ignored.

--
Lynn Kerby <mailto:lfk@kerbit.net>

PS - The above signature was manually included also - balsa seems to ignore
     the identity settings which are to include a signature with separator.