Code Crafters

What's the difference between the Idle Time-out and Idle Session Time-out (both on the web mail configuration page)?

Cameron

The Idle Time-out (secs) on the first tab is a connection idle timeout, meaning that whilever the web page is connected to the mail server, if it remains idle (no commands sent) for more than 300 seconds (5 minutes with the default settings) then the connection will be closed. However, with WebMail requests it is rare that connections ever last anywhere near that long because web pages connect, get the data for that page then disconnect.

Now, the session idle timeout is related to the WebMail login. This is set to 120 minutes (2 hours) by default which is much longer than the 5 minutes for the connection idle time-out. When a user logs in this begins a login session and a session ticket ID is created so that new connections don't have to re-login for every page request. So this timeout controls when the user is logged out if they don't send any new commands.

With other protocols like SMTP one connection is kept alive compared throughout the session. However, with WebMail which makes many connections for small amounts of time but remains logged in with a session ticket even after disconnecting. SMTP, IMAP4, POP3 etc. would be logged out if they disconnected.

Hopefully this clarifies the difference.