[Dovecot] Dovecot imap with Postfix and using Thunderbird as client

[Curtis Maloney]

Shawn Needham wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering if anyone knew of the mysterious fix to this problem 
> that Curtis describes in his followup:
> "I vaguely remember something like this, but I don't recall the fix"
> 
> I recently installed dovecot on a server running RHEL4-AS-U2 and have 
> updated to RHEL latest dovecot package, dovecot-0.99.11-2.EL4.1.

Aside from the myriad bugs that were fixed since this, the blanket 
recommendation now is to use a 1.0 series release, as it is far superior, not 
the least because it is still supported, unlike the 0.99 series.

Yes, I know I'm still running 0.99.14 myself, but that's because I haven't had 
time to upgrade :(  Fortunately, recent additions by Timo (bless his cotton 
socks!) have made this process even simpler.

> 
> Seeing as this is close to the version Curtis is running 
> (dovecot-0.99.14) I was wondering if anyone had some insights.
> 
> There seems to be a Thunderbird specific problem when trying to retrieve 
> messages from the server. Other imap clients (Mac OSX Mail, 
> squirrelmail, etc) don't experience this problem, however Thunderbird 
> 1.5.0.5 experiences it on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows boxes.

If you can't upgrade to 1.0, at least upgrade to 0.99.14... if your distro 
doesn't provide a package, build it yourself.  It really is simple.

Then tell your distro off for not providing newer versions.

> In thunderbird, new messages don't reliably appear and the retrieval 
> button doesn't work when new mail is present. Clicking on an email which 
> isn't cached retrieves new ones as well as waiting around an hour to 
> retrieve messages.

I just had a quick shufti at the ChangeLog in 0.99.14, and there's any number of 
fixes between 0.99.11 and 0.99.14 that could be related.  Again, since nobody 
supports 0.99 any more, it's unlikely anyone remembers which one specifically 
fixed the issue.

All I can tell you is that TB has been working fine on 0.99.14 for a long time here.

> Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.
> 

--
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney at cardgate.net