non-blocking communication with imaplib

[Igor V. Rafienko]

Hi,


I was wondering if anyone had a suggestion for the following issue. I
would like to talk to an IMAP-server, imaplib being the tool of
choice, of course. Unfortunately it may happen that the IMAP-server
fails to respond to certain commands, and I would like to be able to
detect that within a given time period (on the scale of 5-10 seconds).

Initially, I thought about playing with setsockblocking() for the
communication socket in the imaplib.IMAP4 object. However, the IMAP4
object uses a file object ("created from" the said socket), and the
underlying socket must be blocking according to [1].

Is there another option for detecting when the server fails to reply
within a given time slot? Could I perhaps temporarily set the socket
to non-blocking mode? Or maybe I am attacking this problem the wrong
way altogether?

Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,





ivr
[1] <http://docs.python.org/lib/socket-objects.html#l2h-3693>

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I would like to talk to an IMAP-server, imaplib being the tool of
choice, of course. Unfortunately it may happen that the IMAP-server
fails to respond to certain commands, and I would like to be able to
detect that within a given time period (on the scale of 5-10 seconds).

Initially, I thought about playing with setsockblocking() for the
communication socket in the imaplib.IMAP4 object. However, the IMAP4
object uses a file object ("created from" the said socket), and the
underlying socket must be blocking according to [1].

[1] <http://docs.python.org/lib/socket-objects.html#l2h-3693>

According to the documentation
<http://docs.python.org/lib/imap4-objects.html>, you can override
the "read" and "readline" methods. How about replacing them with routines
that use select.select on the socket() object to implement a timeout?

 

[Igor V. Rafienko]

[ Lawrence D'Oliveiro ]

[ ... ]

According to the documentation
<http://docs.python.org/lib/imap4-objects.html>, you can override
the "read" and "readline" methods. How about replacing them with
routines that use select.select on the socket() object to implement
a timeout?

Sounds like a plan. I'll try that. Thank you.





ivr