• John Peacock, 2007-01-09 19:35

[...] When trying to move large numbers of messages to Trash using Thunderbird 1.5.0.9, I would get "Lost connection with server" messages at anything over about 1500 messages. The strange thing is that when I checked the trash folder, the deleted messages were there multiple times, i.e. everytime I attempted to move all messages to Trash, plus everytime it failed until I got below the magic number. [...]

I think this is a Thunderbird problem rather than a Dovecot one. I had the same thing happening recently when I moved last year's logfiles to my archive folder (36000+ messages).

Thunderbird would pop up the "Lost connection" error, and the (re)moved messages showed up in Trash multiple times. I solved the problem by using Mutt instead of Thunderbird to move the messages - it took a while, but it worked on the first try without any hiccups whatsoever.

I haven't tried it, but tuning Thunderbirds timeout values might help. It has a (global?) mailnews.tcptimeout which defaults to 60 seconds, and a per-server mail.server.serverX.timeout which does not have a default value assigned, but seems to get set to 29 seconds when you create your account.

You can check/modify the timeout values in Thunderbird's "about:config" page.

HTH, Thomas

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• Thomas "ZlatkO" Zajic zlatko@gmx.at Linux-2.6.19 & Thunderbird-1.5 -

• "It is not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw." (M. C.) -