[Wanderlust] E-mail client Keeps Freezing

While operations like pulling in my Inbox causes everything to momentarily freeze, I could live with this. But, sometimes, Wanderlust will just freeze without provocation and I'll end up having to dump my Emacs and open it, again. This can consistently happen, without fail, if the internet connection drops (which, unfortunately, mine does often). Does anyone know of any workaround for this? I don't know if it's a fair comparison or not but I actually don't remember Gnus locking up my Emacs, at all (or, at least, in any way that didn't pass relatively soon), let alone causing a crash.

I use Wanderlust with IMAP4 and Maildir folders and I don't have such issues. What do you use? 1. Do you set elmo-network-session-idle-timeout? 2. Does wl-plug-change (unplug/plug) help (maybe you have to press C-g first)? If your internet connection sucks maybe try offlineimap/mbsync and work with Maildir. Wanderlust > Gnus. :-) I don't understand why Gnus is so popular and Wanderlust gets so little attention.

I'm using IMAP4 though I don't think I'm using Maildir (and definitely not using anything which uses offline storage; I just don't have the space for it). 1. I don't; it's currently set to `nil`. Should I set it? What affects does it have? 2. Hmm, I'm not sure what those are, unfortunately; I, actually, think I saw reference to them the other day but I can't find the page again and trying to look for them in Emacs was less than clear. Currently, pressing C-g doesn't do anything and perhaps I'm just not waiting long enough but I've waited for a minute at a time and things have still been frozen. At that point, my only real option is to dump the core. Would `wl-summary-auto-sync-marks` be helpful in anyway? The [Emacs Wiki](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WlFaq#h5o-10) mentions that, if you're just using Wanderlust to access a mailbox (which I think I am, as I'm not storing any of the mail locally?), you can just disable the feature. Heh, fair; I'd looked into it, like, a decade ago and definitely just assumed it was one of the mail clients that fell into disuse. I was really surprised to find there's still very active development going on. It's definitely simpler than Gnus. I dunno if you'd know this but something I *really* loved with Gnus was the ability to make the timestamps of the E-mail show in my timezone; is there any way to do the same with Wanderlust? I've been searching but can't seem to find anything.

I use (setq elmo-network-session-idle-timeout 300) in my ~/.wl. Maybe you have to lower the value.

>setq elmo-network-session-idle-timeout 300) Hmm; I'll give it a try. Do you know why it might reduce Emacs locking up? I would've thought relying on cache more would require less fetching and result in less locking up.

C-h v elmo-network-session-idle-timeout elmo-network-session-idle-timeout is a variable defined in ‘elmo-net.el’. Its value is nil Idle timeout of the network cache. Specified in seconds. If elapsed time since last access is larger than this value, cached session is not reused. If nil, network cache is reused. So it simply drops the current (inactive) session and reconnects. What version of Emacs and APEL/FLIM/SEMI/Wanderlust do you use?

Yeah; I'd looked it up but maybe my own understanding of these things is lacking. I would've thought trying to reconnect would've been more likely to cause a freeze than reusing a cache but maybe it's connection info. that's cached and so trying to use stale connection info. causes hanging connections or something. Sadly, it doesn't seem that made a difference, in the end; Wanderlust froze up again and I waited more than 5 minutes to see if anything might change but the entirety of Emacs is still grounded to a halt, right now. I'm using Emacs 28.1 and a Melpha version of 20220720.1344, for Wanderlust.

Fortunately I cannot reproduce this issue. Even without setting elmo-network-session-idle-timeout only my IMAP4 connection hangs. I can kill with C-g and then Wanderlust reconnects. What OS do you use? What mail provider? Try to set debug-on-quit and press C-g (multiple times) when it hangs. Maybe the debug out shows what's wrong.

See, that's the type of interaction I'd expect but, instead, the whole thing just crashes. It's gotten to the point that I can't run Wanderlust if I want to do anything else with my Emacs because it *will* freeze at some point and the only solution is to kill it. I'm running Guix (Linux kernel) though I installed the package through the normal Emacs package manager (not through the Guix package manager, any; I'm not even sure if Guix has Wanderlust as a package); connecting to Yahoo and Outlook. Mmm; something I didn't know about Emacs, before: I'll try that out and see what it says. Thanks so much for all this help.

So, catching a few debugs, it looks like it's just in the middle of normal functions/processes that Wanderlust runs (`elmo-folder-diff`, `wl-biff-check-folders`, etc.). This happens, too, when running in GUI Emacs except the GUI doesn't choose to dump core when you hit `C-g` more than once. Unfortunate but seems to be the way Wanderlust is built; maybe there aren't a lot of terminal users, for it.