Possible IMAP Bug

[SteveJ]

I've just completed migrating my home system from Courier to Zimbra, and we've migrated our corporate e-mail the same way. I use Thurnderbird as my MUA on both Windows and Mac. I keep Thunderbird running all the time on both systems. However, I am noticing inconsitencies in terms of which messaegs are visible in which copy of Thunderbird. For example, this morning, I checked my home (Windows) system, and I did not see any e-mails in my work account since yesterday morning. However, I looked at my Mac copy of thunderbird, connecting to the same IMAP account, and saw an additional 25 messages.

I never saw this behavior using Courier IMAP, so I'm relatively confident that this is something introduced by Zimbra. The question I've got is, is this a bug? Or is there a configuration option we may have missed that could cause / affec thunderbirds IMAP visibility? Is there any particular logs or traces I should be looking at to debug this?

Thanks very much, in advance.

-Steve J.

[dkarp]

It could be that the current ZCS IMAP server does not support the IDLE command, and your Windows Thunderbird is configured to use IDLE instead of NOOP to get notifications. Check your Thunderbird config.

We had to remove IDLE support because of some unnecessarily terrible low-level locking in the JRE 1.5 socket code (thank you, Sun Microsystems). We're hoping to get IDLE back into the Zimbra IMAP server soon.

[SteveJ]

I couldn't find a thunderbird config item for IDLE vs. NOOP. The closest one that seemed relevant is the setting:

mail.imap.use_status_for_biff, which defaults to true. I'm going to set that to False, and we'll see what else it uses. I'll follow up with results.

[phoenix]

Thunderbird does have IMAP IDLE but, if memory serves me right, it is actually disabled when you set the 'Check for mail ever n minutes' - unchecking that option enables IMAP IDLE. For what it's worth I have IMAP IDLE set on my zimbra server and I've never had a problem with it, however that might depend on your server load (mine is very lightly loaded) so do consider that it might cause you problems.

[phoenix]

I just checked with a copy of Thunderbird and that is the way IMAP IDLE works, turn off 'Check for mail...' and new mail is delivered straight away. HTH