[gentoo-user] Thunderbird and IMAP folders

[gentoo-user] Thunderbird and IMAP folders

[Jim Cunning]

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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

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Re: [gentoo-user] Thunderbird and IMAP folders

[Andrea Conti]

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

[SOLVED] Re: [gentoo-user] Thunderbird and IMAP folders

[Jim Cunning]

  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

Re: [SOLVED] Re: [gentoo-user] Thunderbird and IMAP folders

[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?

Re: [SOLVED] Re: [gentoo-user] Thunderbird and IMAP folders

[Stefan G. Weichinger]

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 ....

Re: [SOLVED] Re: [gentoo-user] Thunderbird and IMAP folders

[kashani]

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

Re: [SOLVED] Re: [gentoo-user] Thunderbird and IMAP folders

[Tanstaafl]

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...