Unity Mail unreliable, no email notification and no crash either

[Coco]

Unity Mail hangs without throwing any error when used over long period of time. I've seen it happening anytime between 1-24 hours. My internet connection is not great, so some connection drop or packed loss is expected. But this problem defeats the very purpose of having a notifier.

[Robert Tari (robert-tari)]

Could you please run it from the terminal:

killall unity-mail
unity-mail

Leave it running, and report back with any error messages or strange output. I will also need to know your Ubuntu version, Desktop Environment and IMAP server.

[Coco (cocos)]

Thank you for the prompt response.

Ubuntu version: Lubuntu Xenial LTS 16.04.2
Desktop environment: LXDE
IMAP server: imap.gmail.com:993

Last time when I checked there were no errors or strange output. I will run it again to confirm. I can also enable debugging, if you let me know how to.

My initial impression is that it is missing a timeout, and it never restarts when is waiting for a server response which is not coming.

[Robert Tari (robert-tari)]

Please make sure you are running the latest version from the PPA (should be 1.7.5 right now).

So far, I've had no complaints with GMail IMAP, the only user that had problems was connecting to a Microsoft Outlook server which was having problems with the imaplib2 that Unity Mail uses.

When there is any kind of message from the server side, Unity Mail will print it in the terminal. GMail usually drops the IMAP IDLE connection every 25-30 minutes - you should also see a message about that, as well as another one after a few seconds, saying whether the re-connection was successful. It also applies if the connection was dropped for any other reason.

Since I am unable to replicate this "hanging", I can only ask you to always run it from the terminal (kill it first if it's running), leave the terminal open while you're using the computer, and check what's going on every few hours.

This might or might not be relevant, but I'll ask you just in case:
- How many user accounts do you have
- Are your accounts monitoring the default "INBOX" folder - if not, how many folders have you selected

[Robert Tari (robert-tari)]

I think the changes in 1.7.6 should solve your problem. I'm marking this as fixed - please report back and tell me how it's working on your end.