Topic: IMAP issues

[compdoc]

I've been using IMAP with Outlook for years, but in the last week or so Outlook has been having problems with my IMAP accounts. (there are three IMAP accounts set up in my Outlook)

There are delays of several seconds now when I delete or send messages or otherwise work with messages, like moving them to folders to organize them.

It seems as though once the first few messages in an account are deleted or worked with, things seem to go normally afterwards. So, I'm thinking the cause of the slowdown must be with the initial connection. 

There have been a few updates in the last few weeks, but I cant really say if this is a result of updates, or some problem with my Outlook. Does anyone have any pointers to what I can check to start troubleshooting this?

Thanks

[Stefano]

I guess that using TB is not an option, isn't it?

[CharlieBrady]

Does anyone have any pointers to what I can check to start troubleshooting this?

Have you made any DNS or network configuration changes lately? Sounds like it could be reverse DNS lookup issues.

You don't say where the IMAP accounts are, but I guess you mean "IMAP accounts on an SME server". IMAP folder indexing/re-indexing might be another possibility.

[compdoc]

My desktop and the SME Server are both on the local lan, and yes the accounts are on SME. Its used as my email & web server.

I haven't made changes, but I could try testing dns from the server. I know nothing about IMAP folder indexing, unless you mean on the outlook client?

[compdoc]

I think I have it sorted. I tried pinging google.com and saw there were some delays in the responses. So, definitely a problem with the SME server itself.

My SME is running in a virtual machine so I changed the two nic types from virtio to e1000, and the delays seem to have gone.

I don't think there has been any updates to the virtio drivers through yum, so I cant say why this problem cropped up. The e1000 emulation has always worked well for me, so no worries...

[compdoc]

No, the issue remains. There's a lag when switching IMAP mailboxes, or when opening an email. I think the e1000 emulation just handles the pauses a little better.

Think I'll try a reinstall of SME.

[stephdl]

What is the virtual envirronment..is it Virtualbox

Do you have installed the contrib openvpn-bridge ?

[Stefano]

how many messages are you handling?
outlook stores everything in a big file.. are you sure the issue is with the imap server (I/O on server side, even if virtual, "lan" traffic) or, instead, the issue is with outlook opening a big file on the client?

trying using webmail and TB.. if the issue remain, let's investigate, if not, change email client

[nicolatiana]

I'm quite sure that Outlook 2010 even with IMAP account does not save locally only headers but the entire message: so your PST it's not so different in size from the one of a POP3 account.
Try Outlook maintenance tools (compress & c) and then give a chance to test with another client as suggested in previous posts (The poor Outlook Express, to start, has a better behaviour than Outlook in mananaging IMAP accounts . . . . ).
 
Nicola

[compdoc]

Don't know why, but I was never notified (emailed) of your responses by contribs.org. Thanks.

The virtual environment is qemu-KVM running on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS. Have used this setup successfully for years with earlier versions of ubuntu and with centos.

Messages amount to 300 or so per day, and my firewall showed there was no real traffic at the times the slowdown was occurring, and top showed no activity.

Outlook is quite fast at handling IMAP over my gigabit lan. I have take all the IMAP accounts out of the Send/Receive groups because of bug that older versions of Outlook had. (and may still have) To update each account immediately, you just have to click directly on the Inbox or one of the other folders for the account. Or, you can wait and the accounts are updated automatically in the background, but its slower.

I found the problem happened because of a mistake I made when testing a restore using bacula. I realize now that I restored these directories in full:

/etc
/home
/root
/tmp
/var

That seems to have upset SME, and after an hour or two after booting, IMAP and other functions became sluggish.

I had been wanting to switch to the 64 bit version of SME 8 anyway, so I installed from scratch and used the workstation backup in SME to restore a backup to my new SME VM. Workstation backup is wonderful. I have to add a couple of directories that are important to me to DailyBackup.dcf using a template, but it has saved my bacon before.

As insurance, this time I added a 2nd virtual hard drive that SME is happily using for raid 1.