Thunderbird 3:maximum request size exceeded

[seewhy]

We have just set up our new ZCS 6.04 server on CENTOS 5.4. Everything run fine except when users check their mail using Thunderbird 3. They keep getting the warning. "The current command did not succeed. The mail server respondedarse error: maximum request size exceeded"
This error seems to happen only when mailbox size exceed 4000-5000 messages.
However, it seems we do not have such problem when using Outlook 2003. Does anyone have such problem? Is this a TB3 problem or there is something that I can set (message threshold?)to make this go away?
Thanks.

[celsowebber]

Originally Posted by seewhy

We have just set up our new ZCS 6.04 server on CENTOS 5.4. Everything run fine except when users check their mail using Thunderbird 3. They keep getting the warning. "The current command did not succeed. The mail server respondedarse error: maximum request size exceeded"
This error seems to happen only when mailbox size exceed 4000-5000 messages.
However, it seems we do not have such problem when using Outlook 2003. Does anyone have such problem? Is this a TB3 problem or there is something that I can set (message threshold?)to make this go away?
Thanks.

Hi,

I've had some similar problems when moving from Thunderbird to Zimbra, by moving the messages through IMAP on Zimbra.

Basically, the problem happened in three situations:
* folders containing too many messages;
* folders containing too many subfolders;
* messages with large attachments (needed to increase the maximum message size allowed by the Zimbra IMAP interface).

Hope this helps.

[seewhy]

Actually, I find it is problem free if I switch back to TB2. Therefore, I believe it is really a TB3 issue.

[lithorus]

Any real solution to this? I suppose it should be possible to change in Thunderbird, but which setting and how low?

I've found this key which might have an impact :
mail.server.default.max_articles

I'm currently trying out with value 100

[seewhy]

I think I did modify that setting but with no luck when I was using TB3 (I can't remember what value I tried). Are you able to get it fixed?

[lithorus]

Originally Posted by seewhy

I think I did modify that setting but with no luck when I was using TB3 (I can't remember what value I tried). Are you able to get it fixed?

Have been running with the value 100 for a day now, and haven't got the error since.

[seewhy]

I tried to install TB3 again and set mail.server.default.max_articles = 200 and the same error still pop up.
I suppose Thunderbird does not handle large imap folders very well. I have colleagues with multi layers of sub-folders and thunderbird cannot "see" some 4th layer folders (I did checked and requery the folder lists). And she have to switch to Outlook to see the folders.
Migrating was a pain as TB can only move small local folders to Zimbra and me and all my colleagues have some 10 gigs of mails in our local machines. The only solution was to buy 3rd party program to convert TB mailbox to .pst and use zimbraPstmigrate.

[FritzBrause]

We see this issue with TB3 too. It seems that this behaviour is indeed a TB3 bug. I enabled TB3 IMAP Logging to get a clue what is happening and found out that this might be related to a bug already filed with TB: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=417480.
I'll investigate further an keep you posted.

Regards

Andreas

[fseaton]

We have an an IMAP utility ("mailutil" - part of University of Washington IMAP) we use to copy messages from a uwash imap server to a zimbra imap server. This util worked fine under Zimbra4 and zimbra 5, but now that we're running version 6, I'm getting this error when copying some (but not all) mailboxes from the uwash server to our zimbra 6 server.

The source mailbox (on uwash) only has 462 messages, and the mailbox is 4.8MB. Not a big request at all.


Output:
Copying INBOX
=> {zimbra.xxx.edu:7143/imap/notls/user="userxxx"}INBOX
/var/mail/userxxx [462 message(s)] =>
{zimbra.xxx.edu:7143/imap/notls/user="userxxx"}INBOX
IMAP protocol error: parse error: maximum request size exceeded
parse error: maximum request size exceeded

See also: Bug 43615 – Accessing some folders gives "maximum request size exceeded"

[fseaton]

Aravind at Zimbra Support just solved my problem and I suspect that it will fix thunderbird as well.

If you're running 6.0.4 (or higher, I assume), you need to increase "imap_max_request_size" in zmlocalconfig. It's defaulting to 10k, and you need to make it larger. I set my to 1M, but I may have to bump that, too.

See bug: Bug 42489 – Fix MULTIAPPEND handling and max message size