[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