Damian wrote:
>>> In the meantime I've found a workaround. Apparently it is a problem
>>> with gnutls. If I kill the process:
>>>    killall gnutls-cli
>>>
>>> and check the mails again, then it works fine, without restarting
>>> emacs (hooray!). Sadly I don't have the time (and maybe not the brain)
>>> to hack into gnus to see if this can be solved more elegantly.
>>>
>>> But after all we live in an imperfect world, don't we?
>>>       
>>  Aha. that's surprising.  But using "gnutls-cli" alone doesn't give similar
>> problem.Apparently, we'r not the only victims, and what Stefan suggested
>> sounds reasonable : "In any case what I see happen is that the
>> underlying connection is stuck and doesn't timeout and Gnus's imap backend
>> doesn't have its own timeout to make up for it."
>>
>>     
> Do you think it is time for a bug report?
>   
I think fire a bug doesn't hurt , at least three of us encounter the 
same problem.