[Dovecot] Thunderbird problem

[Patrick Nagel]

Hi Stan,

On 2010-06-26 03:02 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> Steffen Kaiser put forth on 6/25/2010 7:01 AM:
> > 2) thunderbird opened too many simultaneous connections to the server. I
> > do not remember where they would blocked or terminated, but in some
> > cases thunderbird did not seem to detect this failure
> 
> This is a pet peeve of mine.  Recent TB revs default to opening 5 IMAP
> connections.  Some time ago I did more than cursory testing and found that
> TBird only uses 1 of the 5.  The other 4 just sit there idle, adding
> clutter to the process list and eating a small amount of RAM.  If it
> weren't for Linux' share memory management these processes would be eating
> a whole ton of RAM on busy Dovecot servers.

The connections are used for IMAP IDLE [1], AFAIK. So the first five folders 
(a.k.a mailboxes) you access(?) get "push mail" - the moment a new mail goes 
in or out, Thunderbird knows about it. Why they chose the number five, I don't 
know. IMO it would be better, if you could choose explicitly, which folders 
should be "push", and then TB would create as many connections as you have set 
folders to "push".
Or even better: IMAP NOTIFY [2] gets implemented in dovecot and in 
Thunderbird, and one TCP connection suffices for an arbitrary amount of "push" 
folders :)

Patrick.

[1] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2177.html
[2] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc5465.html

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