IMAP Annoyances

May 8, 2008 10:58 AM

Incredibly annoying IMAP problem - Any ideas?

We are constantly getting dialogue boxes popping up in outlook 2007 with the following message:

"Your IMAP server has closed the connection. This may occur if you have left the connection idle for too long"

Under details, the error code is: 0x800CCCDD

These boxes are popping up *at least* every 10 minutes - sometimes you can get 5-6 of these in a row in the space of 20 seconds! They are exceptionally irritating not least because they require us to click OK, but also because they almost always steal focus away from the window we're working in. It's like being poked with a sharp stick all day.

We have tried (based on searching Google):

- changing the Outlook server timeout settings to 10 minutes
- disabling automatic send and receive for the IMAP emails

Neither of these have improved the situation. Help?

posted by Zinger to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Have you contacted your e-mail provider?
posted by odinsdream at 11:17 AM on May 8, 2008

Possible workaround... Instead of disabling automatic send and receive, try "checking for new mail" more frequently. By default, my version of Outlook Express checks for new mail every 30 minutes. If you checked for mail, say, every 5 minutes, this might keep your connection alive.
posted by shinybeast at 11:22 AM on May 8, 2008

I used to run into this.

In my case, it was a result of having multiple GUI mailers accessing my inbox via IMAP at the same time. For example, it would happen if I went to work and forgot to close Outlook on my home PC. All day long I would be inundated with these irritating messages while I sat at my desk.

Are you just accessing your inbox from one place?

Our mail administrator recently upgraded our mail server to a new version of IMAP and the problem went away and has yet to resurface.
posted by kbanas at 11:57 AM on May 8, 2008

Seconding kbanas' theory. IMAP is designed to allow simultaneous use of a mailbox from multiple clients, but not all servers can do that; ones that don't support simultaneous access will just close the existing connection when a new one is made.
posted by hattifattener at 12:34 PM on May 8, 2008

Tried ShinyBeast's workaround, but so far no love. Still getting the pop-ups. I've issued a trouble ticket about this to our host, but haven't had an answer yet and generally like to go into these things armed with info about what they should be looking at - otherwise I get answers like "We don't support third party apps" etc.
posted by Zinger at 12:38 PM on May 8, 2008

I've seen this with Thunderbird, and the fix was to tell Thunderbird not to make multiple simultaneous connections to a given IMAP server. Outlook has probably got a similar setting buried deep in layers of obscure menus and dialog boxes. Finding the Outlook option you need might be slightly less annoying than being poked with a sharp stick all day.
posted by flabdablet at 6:46 PM on May 8, 2008