User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030827 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030827 I am constantly told that the server has disconnected while checking mail or moving between server folders. It only happens when connected at certain locations ... I've been told this may be related to a firewall issue but find that the app becomes unusable for a few minutes until you can try again -- hopefully not getting the false error again. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.

ok. I've been seeing this too, although under the fog of http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89285, I haven't been able to isolate it. This is a different bug, since it doesn't permanently disable the ability to copy, it just goes down for a single message. I often get the server disconnected message when sending a message, just when trying to copy to the sent folder. A second attempt usually works, but it happens every few minutes or so. I was also concerned that it might be the IMAPserver, which is running on a fairly heavily laden box, or my ADSL line (which was flaky dues to line noise), but a couple of things are leading me to suspect mozilla: 1. my IMAP webmail interface is not experiencing the same problems 2. I've been monitoring the performance of my ADSL (since the engineers came to fix it), and it is not dropping any more. I'd suggest changing platform/OS to all, and I tried to make the summary a little clearer

I know mine is not the IMAP server since other clients (Mail.app on OS X) work just fine and I never see any errors connecting to the server.

possibly related: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196095

I had the same problem, but I'm no longer seeing this problem. Reporter: reopen if you're still seeing this.

I'm not the reporter, but yeah, I'm still seeing this. If anything it's been *worse* with recent builds (last two weeks) I'd reopen it, but I'm not a sufficiently empowered user. do you want me to refile ;) ?

Stefan, your server is dropping the connection - I see several instances of it in the log. I don't know why. It might be that the firewall is dropping the connection because of some sort of timeout. You might try reducing the time that mozilla will cache imap connections: the default is 29 minutes, as mandated by the imap rfc. You can reduce it to a minute or two and see if that helps: user_pref("mail.server.imapserverName.timeout", 2); We would like to gracefully handle the server dropping the connection, and re-running the operation, but it's a little tricky.

ok. I tried that, and it seems to be better. The box the mail server runs on has been taking a bit of a pounding recently, so I'm going to try switching to another one. let's close this, and I'll open another bug if switching doesn't work and I'm suspecting mozilla again.

I think I'll leave this open for the work of trying to re-run the url when the server drops the connection - I have other bugs about that, but this is the freshest :-)

This seems to be related to bug #29782 (and a bunch of other bugs) and to: http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#7.19 and http://www.washington.edu/imap/listarch/1997/msg02344.html (indeed, an email from 1997 :\). I really hope that Mozilla and UW are not going to keep pointing fingers to each other. Grrr, permissions for Bugzilla have been drasticly cut down in the last few months, haven't they :\ Can't even mark bugs as duplicates or change the Hardware/OS fields :(

I am also getting this same bug, however on Windows (Mozilla 1.7RC2). This is the IMAP log for the same problem (the error occurs towards the end of the log, when I've tried to send an email to foo@foo.com). The mailer has been idle for a few minutes at this point. I have found that this just started happening recently for me but seems unrelated to Mozilla (same problems with 1.6 or 1.7). Instead it seems to have been caused by my ISP upgrading the IMAP server from Courier-IMAP 2.2.0 to version 3.0.2. I haven't been able to get the ISP to tell me if they have changed any configuration values at the IMAP server.

I am also seeing this behaviour, the IMAP server here is courier-imap-3.0.3. This is in theory not a problem except that Mozilla chooses to show an alert box when this happens, which apart from being very irritating breaks Mozilla when it's being run unattended - Mozilla does nothing until the user (who is not there at the time) presses ok. This breaks the "check mail every XX minutes" feature. This would not be a problem over an ADSL connection, but over a slow (dialup speed) line it becomes very irritating. The alert box should be changed to an informational message at the bottom of the mailnews pane.

A further comment on this - after clicking "ok" on the informational alert box saying the server has disconnected, the headers list on Inbox disappears (becomes empty). Mozilla does not appear to be doing anything (the throbber is inactive), however a network sniffer shows a constant stream of traffic from the IMAP server to Mozilla. It seems Mozilla is very keen to do a from-scratch refresh of the mailbox at an annoyingly frequent interval, which for me means a 2 hour download before I see any mail. :(

Do you have the junk mail controls turned on, with aging of the junk folder? I think that's the process that causes the alert to pop up - the unattended check for new mail should not cause the disconnected alert to pop up. Starting with today's trunk build, the aging of the junk folder shouldn't cause the alert either.

I live with this problem day in day out on Windows with Moz 1.7RC2/3. Should I spin off another bug for Windows or shall I open it up to all platforms? I can provide an IMAP account at my server which should exhibit the problem after a few minutes of idle time.

Brodie, if you can get me a test account, that would be great. However, I have to say, from the log, your server is just dropping the connection.

David, I'll email you details of the test account. I guessed that the server must be just dropping the connection to me. The problem is more that Mozilla isn't handling this cleanly. Is there some documentation for these log messages (e.g. which number is the timestamp?). I couldn't see any message in the IMAP log from the server disconnect. Is there a message that is displayed at the moment that the connection is dropped, or is it not noticed that the connection is down until we try to write down the pipe? After a period of idle time I get these connection errors. By idle time I mean connecting to the account, then leaving the mailer for 10-15 minutes and doing nothing (IMAP IDLE command isn't supported by this server it seems). The errors that I find after disconnect are: * sending an email, when the email is to be written to the sent folder, the dialog of 'servers disconnected, can't write to sent, retry?' is displayed. It is not uncommon to require multiple retries (e.g. up to 4) before it finally connects and saves to my sent email folder. * checking email (by clicking on the get messages button will display a dialog "the server has disconnected". I need to click again to make anything happen. Sometimes nothing ever happens and I need to restart Mozilla. * changing to another folder may also display the same problem. It seems that automatic mail checks still work okay (I get notifications of new email). Checks are set for every 10 minutes.

I have two POP and two IMAP servers. Even if I do not look at any of my IMAP servers, as long as I have a single Mozilla window open, eg, Composer, every five minutes or so, I get the following popup. Alert ! Server n.n.n.n has disconnected. The server may have gone down or there may be a network problem. [ok] This is new, I have never seen these popups before version 1.7.1 (and probably 1.7) On another extremely similar machine, also running version 1.7.1, and which has one of the same POP server, but which does not have these IMAP servers installed, I do not get these popups. Cheers! Michel

This bug affects Windows as well (98SE) This bug is extremely annoying, because every few minutes, abruptly, the focus is stolen from the current task. The focus is shifted to Mozilla and the stupid, useless, popup has to be cleared..... Who cares that the imap server has disconnected when I am not using my imap email (or not browsing, or not composing)..... This did not happen before 1.7.1 Cheers !

Also seeing this bug day-in-day-out, using Thunderbird 0.7.3 on Windows XP with Courier IMAP server. It's not that it disconnects (this in my case is almost certainly either the IMAP server or my DSL connection), it's that it pops up a dialog box telling me it's disconnected, which is no use to me at all. The Right Thing must surely be silently to attempt a reconnection without bothering the user? Thanks!

If you run a recent trunk or tbird .8 build, you should see a different alert that tells you to go reduce the number of connections we'll cache to your imap server. Go into account settings | imap server | advanced and change the 5 to a 4. That should fix the problem with Courier servers.

Re the "The Right Thing must surely..." comment, it would not help in this situation. If we silently tried to make a new connection, it would still fail because we've bumped into the courier MAXIP limit, and the new connection would fail. We could automatically bump down the number of connections we'll cache in this case, perhaps in conjunction with sniffing the user agent, but so far, we've managed to avoid special casing servers like that...

I am now using Thunderbird 0.8 (20040905) and the problem still occurs; changing the cached IMAP connections to 4 (or 3, 2, 1 or 0) appears to make no difference, and the error message is still the same ('Server xxx has disconnected' etc etc). Courier version is 3.0.7. I'm using SSL for this IMAP connection; apologies for not mentioning this in the first post. I can create a mail account on the courier server for any dev who needs one if necessary. Re: the 'it would not help' reply, please forgive my ignorance of the internals, but when the connection is closed by the remote end, tbird pops up the dialog box, then when I hit 'Get Mail' (or move a message between folders) tbird presumably creates a new connection to replace the old closed one. Why can't the new connection just replace the closed one without requiring user input? Thanks, HTH

sure, thx, create me a test account and e-mail me the info... The reason it doesn't help is this. Say the server limits you to 4 connections, which it does by default. You make 4 connections. Then, you try to make a fifth - the server allows the connection to be made, and then breaks it. This causes the alert. We discard that connection, and try to make a new connection. That new connection is still the fifth connection, and the server again breaks it...

OK, but your targeted "end user" doesn't gain anything from that message box. It's completely foggy what that means, and what happens if the message is dismissed. I for one don't know about any connections to any Courier servers. I just see this when accessing my webmail per IMAP - and I would be fine if that would just fail silently.

This is our targeted message: =Unable to connect to your IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number \ of connections to this server. If so, use the Advanced IMAP Server Settings dialog to \ reduce the number of cached connections. For some reason, that's not the message you're seeing. A test account would help me determine why you're not seeing that message. SSL might be causing a different error to get returned.

I've checked in a fix to trunk so that we won't show you the server has been disconnected message if you've successfully connected to the server, and we'll retry the url. That's under bug 196095. I'm marking this a dup of that. I'll check the fix into the aviary branch as well. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 196095 ***