When a mailbox disconnects

Mailbox connections lapse. It is normal, and it is not a bug.

Why

• A password or app password changed, on an IMAP mailbox.
• Access was revoked, deliberately or by an admin.
• The provider expired the authorization, which Google does routinely.
• Two-factor was switched on, which invalidates old credentials.

How you find out

The connection shows as needing attention and prompts you to reauthorize. You will not get an email about it, so the honest answer is: you find out when you go looking, or when you notice the inbox has been quiet.

If nothing has arrived for a suspiciously calm week, check the connection before concluding that business is slow.

Replying is off while a connection is broken, and the composer says so rather than failing at the moment you press Send.

Reconnecting

Reauthorize the same connection rather than adding a second one. Reconnecting the existing connection keeps its history and its conversations, and mail that arrived while it was broken is fetched on the next check.

Adding a fresh connection to the same mailbox instead gives you a clean slate, which sounds harmless and means the mailbox is read in again from scratch: the 100 most recent messages on Gmail, and everything in the configured folders on IMAP.

Disconnecting on purpose

Removing a connection is different from it lapsing. Steerd stops reading the mailbox and then clears out what was only ever a mirror of it.

Steerd asks you to confirm first, and the dialog names what stays. What survives is what somebody deliberately made, and it is worth reading precisely:

• every message in a thread linked to a project
• a message you turned into a project, meaning you finished the import and a project came out of it
• the replies you sent from Steerd, which are your own record of what you wrote

Note two gaps, and they do not have the same remedy.

Replying to a thread keeps your reply, not the incoming messages around it. If you want the whole correspondence to survive a disconnect, link it to a project. Finishing an import does not help here.

An import you started but never confirmed does not count as filed: the message goes, and so does the draft mapping waiting in your import queue. Either remedy works for this one. Finish the import, or link the conversation to a project.

What is not affected

Projects and contacts already created stay exactly as they are. They stopped having anything to do with the mailbox the moment they existed.