[imp] suggestion on how to handle long composes ?

[Adam Arrowood]

I have IMP 3.1/Horde 2.1 set up with a modified version of Ying Zhang's
php-mysql session handler. Things work just fine with it.

I have had some users complain of losing their message when they do a
compose that takes several hours. The scenario:

--
1. The user has either the "never check for new mail" preference set or
they are looking at a message, not a mailbox

2. They click compose and start to compose a message

3. Their composition takes several hours, longer than my session life
setting (maybe it's a long message, maybe they had to pause in the
middle for something, who knows)

4. When they finally click to send the message, their session has timed
out (I have session lifetime set to three hours) and the message is
never sent.
--

My question is, what is the best way to handle this problem? I would
like to just say, "don't take over three hours to compose a message",
but I'm not sure that's the best way to handle it. I could up the
session timeout value, but don't like that either? Some users are asking
to see a "session countdown" in the compose and/or mailbox screens...
I've thought about making the compose option open a framed window, with
a small frame that periodically refreshes a page that would up the
session expiration time...

Any suggestions?

thanks,
adam arrowood

-- 
Adam Arrowood || http://www.gatech.edu/adam || adam@oit.gatech.edu
Office of Information Technology/O&E/CS
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA USA