dovecot - Jan 2009 - Old Thunderbird problem - need a fix

I've been having a Dovecot/Thunderbird problem for about a year now and 
I need a fix. When I restart dovecot everything is fine but as the day 
progresses thing start deteriorating.

When I empty my trash folder it doesn't empty. I get an indication that 
email has arrived in my inbox by the unread message count but can't 
access it. Messages arrive by appear to be empty. Folders that should be 
empty still have message counts showing.

With all of the above problems - restarting dovecot make them all go away.

I am doing something unusual in that I use Exim to directly deliver 
(maildir) to the inbox and other folders. And I have processes that take 
email out of certain folders (spam learning).

Whatever the problem is I think that when I restart Dovecot I'm forcing 
Thunderbird to reconnect. Perhaps the solution is to somehow force 
Thunderbird to have to reconnect every time rather than have a 
persistent connection?

Looking for suggestions. Thanks in advance.

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On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Marc Perkel wrote:

What Dovecot version do you use? Which mailbox format?
> When I empty my trash folder it doesn't empty. I get an indication that
email
> has arrived in my inbox by the unread message count but can't access
it.
> Messages arrive by appear to be empty. Folders that should be empty still 
> have message counts showing.
When you enable mail_debug, is there something in the logs?
> With all of the above problems - restarting dovecot make them all go away.
Does it work if you just kill -HUP dovecot?
> Whatever the problem is I think that when I restart Dovecot I'm forcing
> Thunderbird to reconnect. Perhaps the solution is to somehow force 
> Thunderbird to have to reconnect every time rather than have a persistent 
> connection?
Try to lower the number of simultaenous connections Thunderbird may use. 
This has the same effect, eventually.

Is the mailbox pretty large? thousands of Mails or >= 2GB in size? 
Thunderbird does not like those ones.

We had an user with a similiar effect. It was a years-old profile 
(probably even converted from a Netscape 4 profile years back). When I 
re-created the profile, just copied the bookmarks file and re-imported the 
addressbooks, the problem was not seen again.

How many users are working on your server?

Bye.

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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