IO timeout in threaded application

[Gordon Messmer]

According to the "signal" documentation, threads spawned as part of a
multi-threaded application can not receive signals.

I have a daemon which I want to validate email addresses by connecting
to the MX for the domain and sending the EHLO/MAIL/RCPT commands. I
would like to place an upper limit on the amount of time spent doing the
validation. I had expected to be able to schedule an alarm() in a
thread, and use that to interrupt the otherwise blocking read/writes.

What's the easiest way to accomplish that? Should I just subclass
smtplib's SMTP class and override the "connect" function with one that
creates a socket with a timeout?

 

[Aahz]

What's the easiest way to accomplish that? Should I just subclass
smtplib's SMTP class and override the "connect" function with one that
creates a socket with a timeout?

If you don't mind having the same timeout for every socket, use either
timeoutsocket.py (or the new functionality in Python 2.3) to set a
global timeout.