Thunderbird and IMAP folders
 

I decided to give thunderbird (and its integrated calendar, lightning) a try
after having some troubles with kontact corrupting and deleting events on a
webdav calendar. I initially tried thunderbird 3.0.4 (which I think didn't
actually have the calendar integrated--not really significant), and had
trouble getting TB to display the contents of my email folders on an IMAP
server. Most folders showed up empty. I have about 180 folders with about
14,000 messages total--the correct folders were shown, just nothing shown in
them.

After a bit of googling, I found a reference to a bug resembling my problem
that supposedly was fixed in 3.1.2. I tried that version without change to
the problem, and today 3.1.2-r1 with the same result.

My IMAP server is net-mail/courier-imap 4.5.0 on the same host as my
workstation. I have no trouble reading folders and their contents with
kontact 4.4.5/kmail 1.13.5

I've tried more googling and searching at the mozilla.org site for clues.
Anyone have any experience with this problem--and perhaps a solution?

TIA,
--
Jim

Thunderbird and IMAP folders
 

Hi,

I routinely use thunderbird to access mail on a cyrus IMAP server with
very large folders (thousands of archived messages).

IMAP support in the 3.1 series seems quite stable to me (whereas 2.x had
frequent problems with folder indexes and 3.0.x tended to hang randomly
while performing server operations)

The only problem I can think of is that if you have used the default
settings for the message search feature, thunderbird will attempt to
build a full-text search index by downloading every message on the
server (body included) when it is first run. Thunderbird will try
downloading messages from multiple folders in parallel, which might
cause a hign load on the server resulting in substantial delays when
listing folder contents.

If thunderbird is indexing messages (look at the progress indicator on
the status bar), try leaving it alone until it is done -- it's a
one-time process.

If, on the other hand, everything is idle, I'm sorry but I have no idea.

HTH,

andrea

Thunderbird and IMAP folders
 

On 09/01/2010 10:44 AM, Andrea Conti wrote:

Hi,

I routinely use thunderbird to access mail on a cyrus IMAP server with
very large folders (thousands of archived messages).

IMAP support in the 3.1 series seems quite stable to me (whereas 2.x had
frequent problems with folder indexes and 3.0.x tended to hang randomly
while performing server operations)

The only problem I can think of is that if you have used the default
settings for the message search feature, thunderbird will attempt to
build a full-text search index by downloading every message on the
server (body included) when it is first run. Thunderbird will try
downloading messages from multiple folders in parallel, which might
cause a hign load on the server resulting in substantial delays when
listing folder contents.

If thunderbird is indexing messages (look at the progress indicator on
the status bar), try leaving it alone until it is done -- it's a
one-time process.

If, on the other hand, everything is idle, I'm sorry but I have no idea.

HTH,

andrea
The problem turned out not to be with Thunderbird at all, but with the
courier-imap configuration. I found in /var/log/messages some instances
of this:

imapd-ssl: Maximum connection limit reached for ::ffff:10.0.0.1

It appears that the default configuration for MAXPERIP (maximum number
of connections to accept from the same IP address) was set to 4. (I
assume it's the default, since I never changed it myself.) Changing the
value to 10 eliminated the Thunderbird problem entirely. I don't know
if some other value between 4 and 10 would work as well. I'm happy with
it as it is now.

--
Jim

Thunderbird and IMAP folders
 

Am 02.09.2010 21:43, schrieb Jim Cunning:

> It appears that the default configuration for MAXPERIP (maximum number
> of connections to accept from the same IP address) was set to 4. (I
> assume it's the default, since I never changed it myself.) Changing the
> value to 10 eliminated the Thunderbird problem entirely. I don't know
> if some other value between 4 and 10 would work as well. I'm happy with
> it as it is now.

Just to understand correctly: this is a courier-parameter, not a
thunderbird-parameter, right?

Thunderbird and IMAP folders
 

Am 02.09.2010 23:25, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger:
> Am 02.09.2010 21:43, schrieb Jim Cunning:
>
>> It appears that the default configuration for MAXPERIP (maximum number
>> of connections to accept from the same IP address) was set to 4. (I
>> assume it's the default, since I never changed it myself.) Changing the
>> value to 10 eliminated the Thunderbird problem entirely. I don't know
>> if some other value between 4 and 10 would work as well. I'm happy with
>> it as it is now.
>
> Just to understand correctly: this is a courier-parameter, not a
> thunderbird-parameter, right?
>

sorry for the noise, you mentioned it ....

Thunderbird and IMAP folders
 

On 9/2/2010 12:43 PM, Jim Cunning wrote:

On 09/01/2010 10:44 AM, Andrea Conti wrote:

Hi,

I routinely use thunderbird to access mail on a cyrus IMAP server with
very large folders (thousands of archived messages).

IMAP support in the 3.1 series seems quite stable to me (whereas 2.x had
frequent problems with folder indexes and 3.0.x tended to hang randomly
while performing server operations)

The only problem I can think of is that if you have used the default
settings for the message search feature, thunderbird will attempt to
build a full-text search index by downloading every message on the
server (body included) when it is first run. Thunderbird will try
downloading messages from multiple folders in parallel, which might
cause a hign load on the server resulting in substantial delays when
listing folder contents.

If thunderbird is indexing messages (look at the progress indicator on
the status bar), try leaving it alone until it is done -- it's a
one-time process.

If, on the other hand, everything is idle, I'm sorry but I have no idea.

HTH,

andrea

The problem turned out not to be with Thunderbird at all, but with the
courier-imap configuration. I found in /var/log/messages some instances
of this:
imapd-ssl: Maximum connection limit reached for ::ffff:10.0.0.1

It appears that the default configuration for MAXPERIP (maximum number
of connections to accept from the same IP address) was set to 4. (I
assume it's the default, since I never changed it myself.) Changing the
value to 10 eliminated the Thunderbird problem entirely. I don't know if
some other value between 4 and 10 would work as well. I'm happy with it
as it is now.


I'd recommend 10 connections per concurrent account that connects to
the server from the same IP. If you're running multiple accounts, like
kashani-list@ and kashani@ in my case, you'll want at least 20. Same
thing applies if you're running webmail for multiple account because all
account access will originate from localhost.


kashani

Thunderbird and IMAP folders
 

On 2010-09-02 3:43 PM, Jim Cunning <jcunning@cunning.ods.org> wrote:
> It appears that the default configuration for MAXPERIP (maximum number
> of connections to accept from the same IP address) was set to 4. (I
> assume it's the default, since I never changed it myself.) Changing the
> value to 10 eliminated the Thunderbird problem entirely. I don't know
> if some other value between 4 and 10 would work as well. I'm happy with
> it as it is now.

I ran into this a long time ago when I first set up our courier server...

TB's default form 'Maximum number of server connections to cache is 5:

Tools > Account Settings > Server Settings > Advanced

So, setting it to 5 would have been enough...