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>
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