Hi All!


A week ago I moved from RH7.3 to openSUSE 10.2
All users files and INBOXES have been copied to new server with the same permissions.

The two differences are:
- I compiled IMAP with different then default mail directory. Everything rest stayed default.
- on new server I use IMAP with SSL – self-signed certificates.

Users are connecting to IMAP with MS Outlook 2003. Some of them (not everyone) are getting error message in outlook while checking mail:
"...your imap server has closed connection" or other errors saying - can't connect to imap server - even if 10 minutes before everything worked fine.
Thunderbird sometimes has also problems with connecting to IMAP server too.

Sometimes in Outlook 2003 I also receive and error:
Task ‘Greg: Folder:Inbox Check for new mail.’ Reported error (0x800CCC0E) :
‘Outlook is unable to download folder Inbox from the IMAP e-mail server for account Greg. Error: Unable to connect to the server. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).’


I run imap and imaps with xinetd and SSL.
Mail logs look fine. I really can’t find the right path how to fix it!

My configuration:

Server:
openSuse10.2
UW IMAP-2006k - used with SSL
I use Postfix as MTA

Client:
Outlook 2003 - configured to work with IMAP - turned off option "Get folder unread count"

I use "/home/mail/username" mailboxes - I guess UNIX mailbox format and the same configuration was on old server.
Sometimes user can reconnect to imap when I kill two or three imapd processes – but I hope that’s not going to be final solution.

With old server I haven’t had any problems with IMAP and this is why I am convinced it is possible to solve it out somehow. Unfortunately I still didn't find the way.
Maybe there is already somebody who went through all these things. ?
I would appreciate any help.

Kind Regrads
Greg

I recommend to run UW-IMAP as a daemon instead of using xinetd. That may be the cause of the disconnects/timeouts. Believe it or not, Outlook Express has a much better IMAP client than all the Outlook 200?. You may want to stick to Outlook Express or another client like Thunderbird.

Dear all,

I managed to sort out the problem with IMAP, which seemed to disconnect outlook after about 10 minutes.

I NEED TO HIGHLIGHT THAT IT WAS NOT AN IMAP PROBLEM!!!

I also must say that UW-IMAP is working just perfect with xinetd.

If IMAP is running from xinetd it is very important to check xinetd.conf file. Depending on how many users are logging to IMAP server it is worth to adjust two parameters:

INSTANCES = 30 #is default, but depending number of users I changed that # to 60

and

cps = 50 10 #is default (SUSE 10.2) - I changed to 25 30

I think the number of running instances does not need any special explains, but it's worth to mention about cps.

cps is the parameter, which limits the rate of incoming connections. Takes two arguments. The first argument is the number of connections per second to handle. If the rate of incoming connections is higher than this, the service will be temporarily disabled. The second argument is the number of seconds to wait before re-enabling the service after it has been disabled. The default for this setting is 50 incoming connections and the interval is 10 seconds.

Hope that helps a little bit. Changing that two parameters solved my problems.

Kind regards,
Greg