[Dovecot] blackberry with imap idle and concurrent connections

[Chris Tirpak]

> I have just confirmed with a direct test that Dovecot 1.0.0 using
> Maildir does properly service 2 simultaneous IDLE sessions on the
> INBOX. I've got my Palm ChatterEmail client logged in and idling and
> have a manual IMAP session (telnet localhost 143...) and the messages
> are popping up on the Palm in lockstep with the 'EXISTS' messages
> kicking out on the telnet session. Meanwhile, Eudora is doing its
> things from my Mac against the same mailbox (actually tossing
> messages out of INBOX to other folders) and I'm pretty sure I left
> Outlook running on my office machine and looking at the same mailbox,
> so whatever flaky stuff it does is happening on whatever schedule it
> uses as well...

Thanks. I have been using the same setup as you with no problems on my
existing server and loved it but have to say that the future of
Chatter looks questionable and my BB's get much better voice and
battery.

>
> Note that one strong consideration for IMAP servers with more than a
> handful of users is going to be dealing with the high concurrency of
> a lot of eternal connections from the Blackberry server and from
> other clients latched onto the same mailboxes. I suspect that one
> reason some systems limit concurrent sessions  is that they don't
> have (or haven't be configured to use) efficient filesystem event
> monitoring, and the alternatives are quite burdensome. In the case of
> Courier, it looks like it still relies on SGI's FAM, an abandoned
> project that doesn't really work well anywhere but Irix and Linux.
> Dovecot has avoided that at the cost of having to understand each
> system's unique approach to that issue.
>

Thanks for the insight.