[Evolution] send/receive race condition on sending mail

[Mike Godfrey <migod uwaterloo ca>]

I'm running evo 1.3.92 on redhat 9, but this is a long-standing problem.

I read my mail using IMAP over SSL; I send outgoing mail to the same
server using SMTP (no SSL).

Problem #1:

Sometimes, my IMAP connection dies and I get a string of error messages
to the effect that the message/folder I want to access doesn't exist. If
I want it to fix itself, I either wait 10 minutes, or if I hit the
send/receive button and it renews the imap connection right away.

Problem #2:

If I send mail while evo thinks the imap connection is dead, the
outgoing mail sits (correctly) in my local outbox until the connection
is brought back up, and then it is magically delivered.  However,
sometimes it sits for quite a while.

If I hit send/receive, the connection is renewed and the outgoing mail
is sent on its merry way.  However, sometimes hitting send/receive
causes more than one copy to be sent out (ie evo managed to send it out
already, but left the message sitting in the Outbox queue).

My guess is that the locking mechanisms are not correctly done, causing
a race condition, but I'm not a mail protocol implementor, so maybe
that's the "correct" behaviour.  But it is annoying that the mail gets
sent, but evo lets it sit in my mailbox so that when I hit send/receive
a few minutes later, a second copy is sent out.  Surely, some sanity
checking should be done with the outgoing queue to make sure a message
isn't being sent multiple times.

Alternatively, perhaps send/receive (what outlook does) could be split
up (what mozilla does).

Any comments/suggestions?

PS this ongoing issue of imap connections dying led one of my colleagues
to drop using evo altogether, which is a shame since one of his grad
students is an ex-ximian employee.

-- 
Michael W. Godfrey            Univ of Waterloo, School of Comp Sci
email:  migod uwaterloo ca    URL:  http://www.uwaterloo.ca/~migod