[Dovecot] Mail.app message numbering for deleted messages

[Tony Kay]

On Tue, 07 Feb 2006 18:52:20 +0200, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 14:00 -0500, Jesse Chan-Norris wrote:
> > > Maybe before with UW-IMAP you just had some "automatically expunge 
> > > messages" option set?
> > 
> > I don't think that UW-IMAP was expunging messages because I could open up 
> > the mbox with pine and see all of the messages flagged as "Deleted" but 
> > not yet expunged. And when I try a similar test with Fastmail.fm (delete 
> > the message in Mail, then check using the web interface) the mail is 
> > marked as deleted in the web interface and does not show up in Mail.app 
> > but the messages are re-numbered appropriately.
> > 
> > Granted, I have no idea how Mail.app does its numbering (especially since 
> > Thunderbird doesn't have message numbering), but is it possible that 
> > there's more information that the IMAP server should be sending back that 
> > Dovecot isn't?
> 
> After trying this out for a while, I think I know what causes it. The
> difference with Dovecot and UW-IMAP is that UW-IMAP allows only a single
> connection to the mailbox (each new connection killing the old one),
> while Dovecot allows multiple.
> 
> Mail.app then goes and creates multiple connections to the mailbox, and
> after deleting the messages, it uses those different connections to
> fetch the mails. Then it somehow gets internally confused and starts
> renumbering the mails.
> 

In the midst of looking at another problem in Mac mail, I did a network dump on the actual non-ssl interaction of mac mail. I did not see any cases where mac mail actually opened simultaneous connections to the same box. It did open INBOX more than once, but only after it had closed the previous.

That said, I have pretty stong proof that Mac mail is seriously buggy (deleting large blocks of messages cause hangs, same thing with message moves), and I would not recommend anyone using it until Apple updates the code.


--
Anthony Kay
University Computing Center
(541) 346-1719
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