dovecot & Apple Mail & maildir & lots of Mail

[Thomas Klausner]

Hi!

I have dovecot 2.1.12 running on a mail server, and recently
configured Apple Mail to connect to it using secure IMAP, for the
first time.

At the beginning it just showed the inbox and everything was fine, but
then I wanted to look at some of my folders and found the 'subscribe'
menu. When I opened it, Apple Mail went to discover what mailboxes
there are, and that's where my trouble began.

It seemed to make good progress for some time (though slow -- over
days), and now lists the mailboxes from starting with letters a to d
on the left hand side (filling all the visible space, so there might
be more). However, whenever Apple Mail gets focus, the cursor becomes
a spinning rainbow circle and I can't interact with it.

I tried deleting the mail account and setting it up again. The inbox
was shown again immediately and Apple Mail was usable, but the first
time the cursor moved over the mailboxes on the left hand side, it
froze again.

There were two imap processes on the server, one rather idle, the
other eating CPU for about two minutes, then idling, and some time
later it disappeared too.

My Mail directory is 31G with about 180 directories, each containing
mails in maildir format.

Has anyone had similar issues?

Is my maildir too big for dovecot too handle?

How can I debug this?

Thanks,
 Thomas