Mail-listener2 - Connection ending

tl;dr: Mail-listener2 appears to timeout, and I want to continually listen for emails without requiring my script to restart.

I'm using the mailer-listerner2 package ( https://github.com/chirag04/mail-listener2/ ) in my node.js project. I would like to continually listen for emails arriving into a particular inbox and then parse these emails for further processing.

I have a connection established as well as my parsing all working, however I am seeing that the imap connection appears to timeout, or at least becomes unresponsive to new emails arriving.

As the mail-listener2 package relies on the imap npm package I have taken a look through the code and attempted to reduce the IDLE timer so that it sends a request to the imap (gmail) servers every 10 seconds instead of once every 30 minutes.

This indeed improved the situation however when waking this morning to check the logs I see the following:

<= 'IDLE OK IDLE terminated (Success)'
=> 'IDLE IDLE'
<= '+ idling'
=> DONE
<= 'IDLE OK IDLE terminated (Success)'
=> 'IDLE IDLE'
<= '+ idling'
[connection] Ended
[connection] Closed

The connection ended & closed appear to come from the core imap module. I thought sending an IDLE check would ensure that the disconnect does not happen, but as you can see this is not the case.

I have also tried looking into Noop but it appears to cause some other issues with mails being read twice.

I understand that if my timers are too low e.g. every few seconds this can cause mails to continually be parsed due to the calls blocking the server responses, which may be why I am seeing the Noop issue above.

Without wanting to go off and keep experimenting with this I'd like to know if others have hit this issue and overcome?

via munkee