Skip to content

IMAP fetch: implement the §5 invocation clock budget #167

Description

@zaridan

specs/mail/mailbox-connection.md §5 requires a bounded clock, and it is not implemented. Deferred deliberately from HT-101 (PR #165) as a starvation risk rather than a correctness one.

What the spec requires

every network operation — IMAP connect, login, SELECT, each FETCH, and every SMTP step — carries its own timeout derived from the remaining invocation budget, and the worker stops starting new work once too little budget remains to finish it.

What exists

src/providers/adapters/imap/client.ts uses independent fixed 30-second connect/greeting/socket timeouts. Ingestion (src/mail/imap-fetch.ts) has no remaining-budget guard and no timeout of its own. Nothing derives a per-operation budget from maxDuration (50s in vercel.json).

Failure scenario

Connect takes 25s, SEARCH/FETCH takes 20s, ingestion starts at second 45 and the platform kills the process mid-ingest. The cursor is never advanced, so nothing is lost — committed messages are safely re-fetched. But the same mailbox can consume every invocation indefinitely without advancing, and the connection may not close on the way out.

This is availability, not silent loss: an intake stall, visible in the sweep's own counters.

Acceptance

  • A single invocation budget is threaded from the cron entry point through connect, select, fetch, and ingest.
  • The worker declines to start an operation it cannot finish within the remaining budget, rather than starting and being killed.
  • Connections close on the budget-exhausted path as reliably as on success and failure.
  • A test proves a mailbox that exhausts its budget yields to the next tick instead of re-consuming it.

Found by an adversarial Codex review of PR #165, 2026-07-31.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions