On 07/24/2014 06:39 AM, Diana Calder wrote:
Hello Angus,
Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 2:20:45 PM, you wrote:
Diana Calder wrote:
I have an odd problem with one user account. When trying to login to
Squirrelmail, the login will hang for several seconds then result in:
ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server.
[ ... snip ... ]
A possible symptom or secondary issue is that the problem account is
using 78% of its 1Gb quota ... He has about 700
messages in his Inbox ...
That might be the issue.
I've seen SquirrelMail serve up blank pages, apparently due to timeout
issues, when trying to open mail folders that contained very large numbers
of messages. I'd give serious consideration to the possibility that
something like that is happening here.
<snip>
Rather than mucking about with the directories on the server as admin,
I decided to just use his The Bat! POP3 account to Dispatch Mail on
Server - All Messages. I'm not quite sure when or how but, at some
point, his POP3 settings had obviously been changed to leave
everything on the server, then changed back to delete from server when
deleted from The Bat! but NOT changed back to delete everything else
from the server after a set length of time - he had messages on there
dating back to about a year after he started working here.
Not only did he have messages going back 3 years, he also had messages
with huge attachments. I somewhat arbitrarily decided that, since he
was using POP3, anything that was previously downloaded was fair game,
and deleted everything more than 90 days old from the server. While
that took him down to only using 16% of his 1Gb quota, it did not
immediately correct the login issue.
However, when I tested again this morning, I was able to login with
his account via Squirrelmail. So, whether it was really the messages
that I cleared out or something else entirely, I don't know. We'll see
what happens over the next little while. Especially when I move his
The Bat! account over to IMAP, as we've been slowly but steadily
migrating all of our user accounts from POP3 (client) & IMAP (webmail)
to IMAP only. Considering the way that his account has been acting,
I'll probably hold off on it till the very end.
I'm also reconsidering that 1Gb quota that some staff members were
given. Realistically speaking, if large numbers of messages may cause
Squirrelmail issues, it might be best to drop that down to 500Mb.
I haven't observed any SM specific problems with large mailboxes. There
were problems with Courier IMAP and large mailboxes, but Dovecot should
have no problems with them. This is one of the reasons we're using
dovecot instead of courier now.
I wouldn't hesitate to let users have 1G mailboxes, so long as you have
the disk space.
Also, be sure to use the dirindex option if you use the ext3/4
filesystem. Not having that turned on can cause performance problems
with folders which have a large number of messages.
--
-Eric 'shubes'
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