[Dovecot] Outlook problem when deleting mails
Hi,
I'm seeking advice to solve the following "mystery":
I set up an IMAP server on Ubuntu 10.04 (dovecot 1.2.9). It appears to work fine apart from one problem.
A colleague is running Outlook 2007 on Vista and sometimes (sometimes very often, sometimes only occasionally) when he wants to delete mails, Outlook hangs for some time (he says about 1, 2 or 3 minutes) until it finally puts out a message box: "The server did not respond to this IMAP command before the connection was terminated"
I have activated the outlook-idle workaround, but I learned that this doesn't do anything anymore, right?
There's no error message in dovecot's logs. Nevertheless, today I found this around the time the error happened:
2010-10-12 17:13:02 imap-login: Info: Login: user=<user>, method=PLAIN, rip=192.168.100.53, lip=192.168.100.20 2010-10-12 17:13:03 imap-login: Info: Login: user=<user>, method=PLAIN, rip=192.168.100.53, lip=192.168.100.20 2010-10-12 17:15:07 IMAP(user): Info: Disconnected in IDLE bytes=272298/631645 2010-10-12 17:15:07 IMAP(user): Info: Disconnected: Logged out bytes=63/539 2010-10-12 17:15:07 IMAP(user): Info: Disconnected: Logged out bytes=462/47082
What exactly does "Disconnected in IDLE" mean? Could the error be related to the same time stamp? (I'm not yet sure, if it always happens this way if the error occurs)
I also found "Disconnected in IDLE" for other users at other times, but no one other complained so far. Maybe, that's because most of the other users use Thunderbird ;-)
Is this problem known? What could I do?
Best regards
Ulf
On 2010-10-12 12:48 PM, Ulf Jaenicke-Rößler wrote:
I also found "Disconnected in IDLE" for other users at other times, but no one other complained so far. Maybe, that's because most of the other users use Thunderbird ;-)
Honestly, it sounds like just another example of how Outlook isn't the best IMAP client... 2007 is much better, and 2010 supposedly builds on that, but in order to get 'better' IMAP support you're forced to use Word for HTML email rendering, which means HTML emails look like total crap compared to Outlook 2003 and earlier which use IE)...
--
Best regards,
Charles
On 12/10/2010 17:48, Ulf Jaenicke-Rößler wrote:
I'm seeking advice to solve the following "mystery":
I set up an IMAP server on Ubuntu 10.04 (dovecot 1.2.9). It appears to work fine apart from one problem.
A colleague is running Outlook 2007
I would suggesting considering the use of an IMAP client which isn't quite so hideously broken.
Whilst I am not aware of any even half decent free e-mail software, Thunderbird 3.0 is, to my mind, at least a quarter decent.
Bill
On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 18:48 +0200, Ulf Jaenicke-Rößler wrote:
A colleague is running Outlook 2007 on Vista and sometimes (sometimes very often, sometimes only occasionally) when he wants to delete mails, Outlook hangs for some time (he says about 1, 2 or 3 minutes) until it finally puts out a message box: "The server did not respond to this IMAP command before the connection was terminated"
I have activated the outlook-idle workaround, but I learned that this doesn't do anything anymore, right?
Right.
What exactly does "Disconnected in IDLE" mean? Could the error be related to the same time stamp?
It means that client was running an IDLE command and waiting there. Dovecot at some point noticed that the client got disconnected there and logs that message.
Wonder if your problem is really some network related issue where a firewall doesn't like long running connections and just starts blocking them at some point.
Am 14.10.2010 16:37, schrieb Timo Sirainen:
A colleague is running Outlook 2007 on Vista and sometimes (sometimes very often, sometimes only occasionally) when he wants to delete mails, Outlook hangs for some time (he says about 1, 2 or 3 minutes) until it finally puts out a message box: "The server did not respond to this IMAP command before the connection was terminated"
Wonder if your problem is really some network related issue where a firewall doesn't like long running connections and just starts blocking them at some point.
Hmmm - interesting thought. This brings something to mind that I had not considered to be important:
Our Ubuntu mail server is running in a VM on Windows (no comments please ;-)). It was running in VMWare server 1.x on XP and we moved it to Windows 2008R2 in VMWare server 2.x. It seems like the problems started (or at least became more frequent) after this.
Another change I made was to upgrade Ubuntu from 8.04LTS to 10.04LTS after the move. So I don't know if the following change in the logs is related to the upgrade or to the problem: While there where "Disconnect on IDLE" messages in the logs before the move/the upgrade, later messages always show up like this: 2010-10-14 15:50:11 IMAP(user): Info: Disconnected in IDLE bytes=1691/5522 (with "bytes=x/y"). What does it mean?
How could I get more information? Is there a more verbose log? Could it help?
I tried to telnet mail 143 1 login user pass 2 select inbox 3 idle
but this doesn't seem to cause a problem.
Best regards Ulf
participants (4)
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Charles Marcus
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Timo Sirainen
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Ulf Jaenicke-Rößler
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William Blunn