dovecot - May 2005 - Fedora Core 3 and Mail.app problems

Hello,
first thanks for all the work, I appreciate the attention to security 
:-)

I have a performance issue I am trying to solve.  On my new server it 
would appear that synchronizing changes between the client and server 
is taking longer then my previous setup.  I have recently upgraded from 
my old server to a new home (the basis for my comparison),

From:
- Redhat 9.0, uw-imap, using self-signed ssl certificates, on an old 
p-II.
- Only one email user (me), about 40 mail folders with a few dozen 
messages in each.
- Performance was never an issue, Mail.app took maybe 20 seconds to 
sync up minor deletes etc.

To a new home:
- Clean install of Fedora Core 3 on a p4, dovecot-0.99.13-3.FC3.
- Copy of /home/gturner/mail directory to new server, ie existing mbox 
format from uw-imap.
- Recreated new self-signed certificates on new server, manually added 
the self-signed certificates, connected with no problems.
- Mail.app client, on OS X 10.3.9 (no Tiger yet).

I deleted the account on Mail.app, and created it again, the first 
login/sync took a long time, which was expected.

However after that, I noticed that when I first connect or delete a 
file the sync is slower then the old setup (FYI, I keep "Automatically 
synchronize changed mailboxes" checked on Mail.app).

A result of this appears to be some corruption of some mailboxes, only 
one or two, nothing valuable.  For example, I delete a file and then 
clear the trash while things are still syncing.  So my current solution 
is to be patient. :-)

Any suggestions?

I know that I could covert everything over to maildir, but I would like 
some feedback to see if this would be reasonable.

I also noticed that initially there are 3 'gturner imap' threads and 
the syncing seems to be flying along.  Then the thread count goes to 5 
or 6 and sync starts to crawl.  I looked for a way to limit the number 
of spawned threads, but only saw stuff about 'waiting' threads or 
reference to 1.0.

I have attached my dovecot.conf for reference.

Any help is greatly appreciated,
Gord Turner.

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On 14/05/2005, at 12:17 PM, Gordon Turner wrote:
>
> I have a performance issue I am trying to solve.  On my new server  
> it would appear that synchronizing changes between the client and  
> server is taking longer then my previous setup.  I have recently  
> upgraded from my old server to a new home (the basis for my  
> comparison),
>
> To a new home:
> - Clean install of Fedora Core 3 on a p4, dovecot-0.99.13-3.FC3.
> - Copy of /home/gturner/mail directory to new server, ie existing  
> mbox format from uw-imap.
> - Recreated new self-signed certificates on new server, manually  
> added the self-signed certificates, connected with no problems.
> - Mail.app client, on OS X 10.3.9 (no Tiger yet).
>
> I deleted the account on Mail.app, and created it again, the first  
> login/sync took a long time, which was expected.
>
> However after that, I noticed that when I first connect or delete a  
> file the sync is slower then the old setup (FYI, I keep  
> "Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes" checked on
Mail.app).
You may or may not be aware that there is a problem with Mail.app in  
10.3.9 and IMAP (specifically IMAPS) connections. These problems have  
been discussed at length in the OS X 10.3 support forums at http:// 
discussions.info.apple.com/macosx3mail/. It seems to be an odd bug  
though, as it does not affect all users and may be related to the  
IMAP server they're using.

I had the problem with Mail.app in 10.3.9, talking to my Dovecot  
IMAPS server. I've upgraded to OS X 10.4 and the problem appears to  
be resolved. Apple should, however, produce a fix for the bug  
introduced in 10.3.9 in a future update.

Hope this helps.
--
Rik Wade