dovecot - Oct 2010 - Outlook problem when deleting mails

Hi,

I'm seeking advice to solve the following "mystery":

I set up an IMAP server on Ubuntu 10.04 (dovecot 1.2.9). It appears to work fine
apart from one problem.

A colleague is running Outlook 2007 on Vista and sometimes (sometimes very
often, sometimes only occasionally) when he wants to delete mails, Outlook hangs
for some time (he says about 1, 2 or 3 minutes) until it finally puts out a
message box:
"The server did not respond to this IMAP command before the connection was
terminated"

I have activated the outlook-idle workaround, but I learned that this
doesn't do anything anymore, right?

There's no error message in dovecot's logs. Nevertheless, today I found
this around the time the error happened:

2010-10-12 17:13:02 imap-login: Info: Login: user=<user>, method=PLAIN,
rip=192.168.100.53, lip=192.168.100.20
2010-10-12 17:13:03 imap-login: Info: Login: user=<user>, method=PLAIN,
rip=192.168.100.53, lip=192.168.100.20
2010-10-12 17:15:07 IMAP(user): Info: Disconnected in IDLE bytes=272298/631645
2010-10-12 17:15:07 IMAP(user): Info: Disconnected: Logged out bytes=63/539
2010-10-12 17:15:07 IMAP(user): Info: Disconnected: Logged out bytes=462/47082

What exactly does "Disconnected in IDLE" mean? Could the error be
related to the same time stamp?
(I'm not yet sure, if it always happens this way if the error occurs)

I also found "Disconnected in IDLE" for other users at other times,
but no one other complained so far. Maybe, that's
because most of the other users use Thunderbird ;-)

Is this problem known? What could I do?

Best regards

  Ulf



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On 2010-10-12 12:48 PM, Ulf Jaenicke-R??ler wrote:
> I also found "Disconnected in IDLE" for other users at other
times,
> but no one other complained so far. Maybe, that's because most of the
> other users use Thunderbird ;-)
Honestly, it sounds like just another example of how Outlook isn't the
best IMAP client... 2007 is much better, and 2010 supposedly builds on
that, but in order to get 'better' IMAP support you're forced to use
Word for HTML email rendering, which means HTML emails look like total
crap compared to Outlook 2003 and earlier which use IE)...

-- 

Best regards,

Charles

On 12/10/2010 17:48, Ulf Jaenicke-R??ler wrote:
> I'm seeking advice to solve the following "mystery":
>
> I set up an IMAP server on Ubuntu 10.04 (dovecot 1.2.9). It appears to work
fine apart from one problem.
>
> A colleague is running Outlook 2007
I would suggesting considering the use of an IMAP client which isn't 
quite so hideously broken.

Whilst I am not aware of any even half decent free e-mail software, 
Thunderbird 3.0 is, to my mind, at least a quarter decent.

Bill

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 18:48 +0200, Ulf Jaenicke-R??ler
wrote:
> A colleague is running Outlook 2007 on Vista and sometimes (sometimes very
often, sometimes only occasionally) when he wants to delete mails, Outlook hangs
for some time (he says about 1, 2 or 3 minutes) until it finally puts out a
message box:
> "The server did not respond to this IMAP command before the connection
was terminated"
> 
> I have activated the outlook-idle workaround, but I learned that this
doesn't do anything anymore, right?
Right.
> What exactly does "Disconnected in IDLE" mean? Could the error be
related to the same time stamp?
It means that client was running an IDLE command and waiting there.
Dovecot at some point noticed that the client got disconnected there and
logs that message.

Wonder if your problem is really some network related issue where a
firewall doesn't like long running connections and just starts blocking
them at some point.