I note that modern email clients maintain multiple concurrent IMAP connections to the server, e.g. Thunderbird has a (configurable) default of (?) 5, which would speed up polling multiple inboxes on one server and allow faster message copying between multiple folders.
Excessive connections from one client, on the other hand, may be a dictionary attack.
I had set a per_source limit of 10 on POP and 20 on IMAP in Linux xinetd.d/*. That works fine with Thunderbird and Squirrelmail, Alpine etc. (we don't have big NAT'ted client farms). However, we've been getting connection problems from MAC machines and logging xinetd per_source_limit failures.
Is this a bug in Mac Mail ? Does it really need that many connections, and if so how many ? I'm reluctant to dedicate so much server resources to one or two users for no good reason, or weaken filters against network attack.
-- Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376 (Pacific Time) Network Security Manager _______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list [email protected] http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
