Topic: SME 5.6 IMAP broken

[Charlie Hartill]

I've been using IMAP to connect to SME server from a variety of clients since version 5 but now it's suddenly broken.

tail /var/log/maillog gives

Mar  3 22:30:01 AMHURST imapd[2554]: Command stream end of file, while reading line user=??? host=[10.227.100.115]
Mar  3 22:30:01 AMHURST imapd[2555]: Command stream end of file, while reading line user=??? host=[10.227.100.115]
Mar  3 22:30:01 AMHURST imapd[2556]: imap service init from 10.227.100.115
Mar  3 22:30:01 AMHURST imapd[2556]: Command stream end of file, while reading line user=??? host=[10.227.100.115]

and on and on...

When I access via webmail it sort of works but sometimes an action just spews out HTML/Javascript code.

This seems to have happened after I allowed webmail to perform maintenance operations. I may have had another IMAP client logged on at the time.

What should I do?

Charlie

[Paul]

You are exactly correct, I just spend hours today on fixing this very problem.

Basically it seems if there are more than 10 concurrent IMAP connections it may refuse additional connection requests. The company I deployed SME Server 5.6 at were fine until today when they had more people in than normal and suddenly people couldn't log into their twiggi webmail. The admin made matters worse by upping the session timeout, and all hell broke lose.

There is an update available for Service Link subscribers which will be made available to ordinary mortals soon. I couldn't wait, so I had to change IMAP servers to Courier (visit www.neddix.de). Incidently, twiggi now works perfectly where before the mail folder management appeared to be non functional. Now I have my fingers crossed for tomorrow morning...

[Andrew Hodgson]

Hi,

I may migrate to Courier to fix the Outlook and purging problem I discussed last week also - I need to do a clean install as the hard drive broke.  Has anyone tried Courier with Outlook/Outlook Express?

Andrew.

[Charlie Hartill]

Thanks for these replies. I rebooted server and client and the problem went away. I'm very distressed about the 10 connection limit. This seems amazingly low. I was thinking of converting a company I support to IMAP, but this now seems out of the question.

Charlie

[Charles Chambers]

Rather Long, but I hope it helps.

I had some unusual send/receive issues after installing twiggi from Daryl May's myezserver.com. Outlook XP on send/receive would crash when checking the IMAP store. Clicking on the IMAP folder however would work fine.  I disabled send/receive on the imap account to solve the problem.

Perhaps this has to do with the IMAP port 143/notls setting in the twiggi panel?

Outlook Express 6 did not have any problems.
Imagine a problem with Microsoft Outlook...Strange indeed.

This is from the IMAP Toolkit FAQ at:
http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/FAQ.html



7.18 What do the syslog messages:
  Command stream end of file, while reading line user=... host=...
  Command stream end of file, while reading char user=... host=...
  Command stream end of file, while writing text user=... host=...
 
    mean?
   
           This message occurs when the session is disconnected without a
           proper LOGOUT (IMAP) or QUIT (POP) command being received by
           the server first.
           
           In many cases, this is perfectly normal; many client
           implementations are impolite and do this. Some programmers
           think this sort of rudeness is "more efficient".
           
           The condition could, however, indicate a client or network
           connectivity problem. The server has no way of knowing whether
           there's a problem or just a rude client, so it issues this
           message instead of a Logout.
           
           Certain inferior losing clients disconnect abruptly after a
           failed login, and instead of saying that the login failed, just
           say that they can't access the mailbox. They then complain to
           the system manager, who looks in the syslog and finds this
           message. Not very helpful, eh? See the answer to the Why can't
           I log in to the server? The user name and password are right!
           question.
           
           If the user isn't reporting a problem, you can probably ignore
           this message.

[Paul]

Well its simultaneous connections, and it only surfaced with quite a few people logging on at once.

So far courier-imap seems to both fix this issue AND issues with folders in twiggi.

[Charlie Hartill]

Paul - I don't quite see your point. No-one has suggested that ten consecutive connections would cause a problem, so why your emphasis on 'simultaneous'. You also say that a problem 'only surfaced with quite a few people logging on at once'. Why quite a few? I had the problem with just one user. Surely the number of well-behaved clients needed to cause a problem is 10, which is very few compared to the number that this software is designed to support.

I do understand that I can install other packages when the built-in ones don't work. By the same token, I could just build my own customized RedHat Linux, write my own patches etc. I thought the idea was the the provided packages worked.

So I don't understand your contribution.

Charlie

[Cliff]

Yes,  when you pay this much for software it should work without effort

Courier is an easy install and fixed my problems with Eudora and Pegasus not able to access the mail folders.

[Charlie Hartill]

Yes I understand now. When the software is free it should come with an option by default that does not work as well as an easy-to-install alternative. I'll remember that for the future. Thank you so much for the courtesy and good humour with which you corrected me.

The same goes for PPTP I suppose. Because the software is free it doesn't matter that this is now broken as part of a recommended upgrade. Anybody who does anything for free has no duty of care at all. If a doctor treats someone for free, they can't complain if they die. etc. etc.

[Kevin]

Hi

I have installed the courier imap update - works great with Pegasus. Does anyone hav it working with the horde webmail interface set to IMAP. I keep getting invalid folder so I guess the horde system doesn't talk to courier properly. Would be nice to be able to use Pegasus and also have the webmail to fall back to when travelling and get all email etc.

Am about to start working thru the horde doco etc, but if anyone has fixed it I would appreciate some assistance or a note to say no can do.

Regards
kevin

[Dan Brown]

Kevin, it works very well, but you'll need to create a custom template fragment at

/etc/e-smith/templates-custom/home/httpd/html/horde/imp/config/servers.php/120IMAPServers

It should contain this:

$servers['imap'] = array(
    'name' => 'IMAP Server',
    'server' => 'localhost',
    'protocol' => 'imap',
    'port' => '143/notls',
    'folders' => '',
    'namespace' => 'INBOX.',
    'maildomain' => '{ $DomainName }',
    'smtphost' => 'mail.{ $DomainName }',
    'realm' => '{ $DomainName }',
    'preferred' => ''
);

If you're running the stock version of IMP, get rid of the /notls on the port line.