[Bug 300784] New: Need more resilience against intermittent authentication failures

[Szczepan Hołyszewski]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300784

            Bug ID: 300784
          Severity: wishlist
           Version: unspecified
          Priority: NOR
                CC: kdepim-bugs at kde.org, vkrause at kde.org
          Assignee: mcguire at kde.org
           Summary: Need more resilience against intermittent
                    authentication failures
    Classification: Unclassified
                OS: Linux
          Reporter: rulatir at wp.pl
          Hardware: Archlinux Packages
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
         Component: POP3 Resource
           Product: Akonadi

I have 2 POP3 accounts on a server that is plagued by intermittent
authentication failures: a POP3 login attempt with correct credentials will
just randomly fail once in ten attempts or so. Whenever this happens during a
periodic mail check, akonadi re-prompts me for password. This is very
distracting because the password dialog pops up out of the blue every 20
minutes or so, interrupting work and thought.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
I would expect akonadi to use a more robust strategy:
- upon first failure, silently retry the same password a configurable number of
times.
- if these attempts fail, *skip* one periodic check or *wait* a configured
amount of time, whichever will result in retrying sooner.
- only show the password dialog if the known password still fails after the
retries *and* the wait.

I believe that "intermittent network or server problem" is generally a much
more likely cause of authentication failures than "user has actually changed
the account password". The design of strategies for dealing with POP3 login
failures should be guided by this assumption.

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