Watching mailbox: Exception: Server closed the connection (EOF)

[goaround]

Hi,

I get quite frequently the Exception: Server closed the connection (EOF) if I watch a mailbox. My Daemon restarts the process but all unhandled emails are ignored.

I would suggest an option to the command to process all existing emails inside a mailbox on start.

[stevebauman]

Hi @goaround,

but all unhandled emails are ignored.

Can you elaborate on this? How quickly is your daemon restarting? The daemon should be restarted immediately on exception, so emails aren't missed.

I would suggest an option to the command to process all existing emails inside a mailbox on start.

I don't think this is the right approach, as some mailboxes could have tens of thousands of emails and we'd unnecessarily re-process all of them. We may need to introduce some kind of caching mechanism to store the last successful connection time and retrieve emails after that time upon failure.

[goaround]

I run a few times into this issue because I watch a separate folder (not the Inbox) and moved a couple of emails into it. I then got the exception after a few emails were processed. The daemon restarting pretty quickly but it ignored all existing emails in the folder.

I would suggest the option not as the default. I now have created a command which runs every ten minutes to pick up all unprocessed emails.

[stevebauman]

Thanks for the info @goaround. I think I have an idea that will help you out with this. I'll have a PR up shortly 👍

[stevebauman]

Ok I've released [v1.1.0]. In this release, I've added a new event that you can register a listener for called MailboxWatchAttemptsExceeded:

use DirectoryTree\ImapEngine\Laravel\Events\MailboxWatchAttemptsExceeded

This event is dispatched before the command throws its fatal exception (after all attempts have been exceeded).

This allows you to add a listener to this event and dispatch a job to process emails that may have been received after the command failure. Here's an example (psuedo-code):

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Event;
use DirectoryTree\ImapEngine\Laravel\Events\MailboxWatchAttemptsExceeded;

Event::listen(function (MailboxWatchAttemptsExceeded $event) {
    $event->mailbox; // "default";
    $event->lastReceivedAt; // Carbon

    Bus::dispatch(
        new ProcessEmails(
            mailbox: $event->mailbox, 
            after: $event->lastReceivedAt,
        )
    );
});

Let me know if you have any further suggestions 👍