Frustrated that KMail won’t use IMAP IDLE with Gmail? I found the blocker :-)

Development
1

For some reason I really like having IMAP IDLE - emails drop in individually when received, rather than as a group when polled. Annoyed me an unreasonable amount that although IMAP IDLE was advertised and was present in the codebase, it simply wasn’t working and I couldn’t seem to get AkonadiConsole to show me anything useful. Added some debug statements in to kde-pim-runtime to check.

The short version: the IDLE code path is present and looked like it should work, but for my totally normal Gmail/OAUTH2 account it was blocked by a ‘mustFetchPassword’ check in ImapResourceBase::startIdle():

if (settings()->mustFetchPassword()) {
    return;
}

After removing that return (as a test - not a ‘proper’ fix) - ImapIdleManager was created for INBOX and KMail received new mail via the IMAP IdleJob without polling.

I’ve added details to the KDE bug here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520672

This isn’t a final fix, but if anyone else is comfortable rebuilding kdepim-runtime and has Gmail/Google Workspace accounts in KMail, then you too can experience IMAP IDLE! Also - maybe this is a pointer for devs for a potentially easy fix if you want to get KMail IMAP IDLE support working for everyone.

2

To close this one off, did some more investigation and found the correct fix, proposed it back to the project, it’s accepted and is now upstream. Tiny fix in a large codebase!

RussH