Hello,

  I've searched and searched for a solution to this problem but continue to come up empty.

  I have a very generic setup.  CentOS Linux 7.3.1611 running on AWS.  I installed the QMail toaster from here: http://www.qmailtoaster.com/ ( I had been using Bill Shupp's Qmail Toaster for years and years, but he stopped supporting it.)

  As such, I did have to convert my Courier mailboxes to Dovecot (no real problem there).

  I'm using Thunderbird client on Windows and Mac.

  I have one user (me) using two vpopmail domains with a total of three mailboxes.    Each mailbox has about 20 folders which I tag in Thunderbird as "When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder".  I might have two or three client machines (at different locations) running at once (desktop and two notebooks) all trying to get mail.

  The problem is I can't go 5 minutes without Dovecot timing out on me, returning an error in Thunderbird: "Login to server failed" and asks to "enter new password, cancel, or retry" options, or just hanging.

The only way to get Dovecot back is to bounce both dovecot and the network via:

/bin/systemctl restart  dovecot.service ; /bin/systemctl restart network

Then I can resume normal activities for a while.  It got so bad that I put the above restarts into a cron job running every 5 minutes. But even then the problem persists after a couple of minutes. There's nothing else running on this box.

I've already increased both mail_max_userip_connections = 8000 and: protocol imap { mail_max_userip_connections = 8000 mail_plugins = " quota imap_quota" }

By the way, the the identical mailbox and client setup, I never had this problem with Courier IMAP.

My dovecot -n is pasted below.

So I'm at a loss on how to fix this.  I have tried adjusting the number of cached Thunderbird connections, and that doesn't change anything.

Any help or pointers in the right direction to keep Dovecot connected would be most helpful.

Thanks, -hank

Here is my dovecot -n

# 2.2.24 (a82c823): /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 3.10.0-514.26.2.el7.x86_64 x86_64 CentOS Linux release 7.3.1611 (Core) auth_cache_size = 64 M auth_debug_passwords = yes auth_mechanisms = plain login digest-md5 cram-md5 first_valid_gid = 89 first_valid_uid = 89 log_path = /var/log/dovecot.log login_greeting = Dovecot toaster ready. mail_max_userip_connections = 8000 mail_plugins = " quota" namespace { inbox = yes location = prefix = separator = . type = private } passdb { args = cache_key=%u webmail=127.0.0.1 driver = vpopmail } plugin { quota = maildir:ignore=Trash quota_rule = ?:storage=0 } protocols = imap ssl_cert = </var/qmail/control/servercert.pem ssl_dh_parameters_length = 2048 ssl_key = </var/qmail/control/servercert.pem userdb { args = cache_key=%u quota_template=quota_rule=*:backend=%q driver = vpopmail } protocol imap { mail_max_userip_connections = 8000 mail_plugins = " quota imap_quota" } protocol pop3 { pop3_client_workarounds = outlook-no-nuls oe-ns-eoh pop3_fast_size_lookups = yes pop3_lock_session = yes }