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I read gmail via IMAP with the mutt MUA. If I leave mutt open and idle for several minutes, then the program becomes unresponsive to keyboard input, requiring me to kill the process. I am not certain whether the issue is IMAP timeout or something else. I have changed pertinent IMAP settings to values that should preclude IMAP timeout. Relevant settings from my .muttrc configuration file:

unset imap_passive
set imap_keepalive = 120
set timeout = 30
set mail_check = 60

How can I troubleshoot the keyboard unresponsiveness especially with regard to determining whether it is attributable to loss of the IMAP connection. Thanks.

user001
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3 Answers3

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Check your logs for anything interesting, e.g. /var/log/messages or /var/log/mail.log.

You could also open up a separate SSH session or console and attach an strace to the mutt process once you've started it. Locate the pid with ps aux | grep mutt in your other session/console, and do

strace -p pid

You should be able to get an idea of what mutt is hanging/crashing on, or at least a new trail to follow for troubleshooting. You may also want add the -f switch to strace to follow the child processes if it forks. Let me know what you find...

Banjer
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  • Thanks for the suggestions. The `messages` log is filled with the message `Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain` every ~3 minutes, which is unexpected because I thought I had disabled wireless (it must have turned itself back on after a reboot). I suppose this could relate to an IMAP timeout, although I had a simultaneous active Ethernet connection throughout. All the `mail.*` logs are empty. Thanks for suggesting `strace`, as I wasn't aware of this tool. I will let you know if there are any interesting system call errors. Thanks again. – user001 Aug 01 '12 at 06:55
  • PS: Is it a bad idea to leave `mutt` running on my computer and then later `ssh` into my computer from another terminal and launch another instance of `mutt` for temporary use? – user001 Aug 01 '12 at 07:30
  • @user001 If you run mutt inside a screen or tmux process, you can just attach to the running process. –  Dec 07 '12 at 14:13
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It may be the network going down and up, particularly wireless. Mutt uses blocking IO which is an old design and is not likely to be fix anytime soon. See: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=105030.

The issue is likely to be resolved by offlineimap + mutt setup.

Karol Kreński
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It's most likely related to bug 2540 in which Mutt crashes after an IMAP timeout.

There are several other IMAP related crash tickets that have been closed for the 1.6 release. Hopefully it will be released soon as I am facing the same issue.

TenLeftFingers
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