[Dovecot] OT: parallel connections to the IMAP server

[Jan Kundrát]

cl at isbd.net wrote:
>> Well, speaking from the client's perspective, it makes perfect sense to
>> have five idling connections to five mailboxes that are expected to
>> receive new mails rather than doing periodical STATUS polls on them. No
>> client should rely on such a behavior, though, and a lot of people would
>> probably say that it's insane to open 100 concurrent connections. I'd
>> agree with them :)
>>
> Another issue with this problem is that it should be totally hidden
> from the user.  I've seen this happening with Thunderbird which, if I
> remember correctly, defaults to a maximum of five connections and even
> this often conflicts with ISP (and other) IMAP setups.  The result is
> an error message which 99% of users can't understand and can't fix.
> 
> The MUA and the IMAP server should 'negotiate' a mutually acceptable
> number of ports.

Any ideas about the proper negotiation algorithm? The easiest way would
be to try opening as many connections as desired, until the server
starts killing them. That won't be much robust, though, as the server
can close the connection for variety of other reasons.

The best way that comes to my mind is limiting the number of parallel
connections in client's config.

Cheers,
-jkt

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth

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