I ran into two other ISPs in Ottawa that had their IMAP servers misconfigured. Dovecot and Courier have some limits that usually need to be reconfigured. Notably, they only allow a limited number of connections from a source IP address. When you sit behind a NAT firewall, all of the connections appear to come from the same address. Some of the smaller ISPs do this to simplify their network management. The end result is that you can't connect properly a lot of the time.
Modern mail clients don't help in that the IDLE protocol allows them to hold connections, and they often log in once for each mail box you may be monitoring. Hope that helps. -- Glenn Henshaw Waterloo, Canada Email: thraxi...@mac.com On 2012-10-30, at 9:10 AM, U30A J C Nash <nas...@uottawa.ca> wrote: > Thanks to several on list, Don Kelly in particular, I was able to see > that IMAP was not connecting at uOttawa (but was on gmail). I spent > about an hour with a couple of the Telfer IT folk, and we could not get > a connection, so phoned central CCS. I sent them some logs and later in > the day, things started working. > > However, in updating a couple of machines, I found that I got similar > problems when setting up email. It appears that Thunderbird in > particular, but also Evolution (and early Claws mail) seemed to get into > difficulties connecting to uOttawa, and it took several tries to get the > settings "in". It appears to be necessary to purge all processes that > might be involved. Certainly changing account settings does not take > effect until the email app is closed and restarted at the least. As > indicated gmail doesn't seem to be affected. Once Tbird gets a bad > connection, it seems to "remember" this and the trouble stays. There may > be an interaction with the gmail account activity that affects things too. > > While this is a rather particular issue (i.e., uOttawa for me), from the > very many posts about similar matters on various of the forums, I > suspect that better diagnostic tools and prescriptions for at least > guiding a fix are in order. Since several of us will be talking about > email backup in December, and it was the issues with IMAP that started > that initiative. > > If there are folk interested in trying to document and ameliorate such > problems, please get in touch and I'll see what can be said and done for > the Dec. meeting. I also plan to be at Nov 1 meeting, and hope some > planning for Dec. can take place there. Email is one of the most heavily > used and pervasive applications, so a good opportunity for OCLUG to shine. > > Cheers, JN > > _______________________________________________ > Linux mailing list > Linux@lists.oclug.on.ca > http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux _______________________________________________ Linux mailing list Linux@lists.oclug.on.ca http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux
