Technical Help Required - IMAP problem

I am running SuSE 9.3 on a 2.8Ghz P4 with 1G RAM. I have a fair amount
of experience with Linux so technical details are welcome.

I have correctly configured Linux email clients to read mail from my
IMAP server at work, however they are all very slow. It takes around 2
minutes to refresh the contents of my inbox. I have tried with KMail,
Thunderbird and Evolution however the problem is still the same.

On the same machine I have Windows 2000 running on vmware virtual
machine. If I use Thunderbird from within vmware using exactly the same
settings, it works fine and there are no delays.

I think that Windows is running some kind of service that Linux does
not. I've tried running an identd daemon but that doesn't make any
difference. Maybe I could do something with a samba server. Any ideas?

On 2005-09-14, (E-Mail Removed) <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> minutes to refresh the contents of my inbox. I have tried with KMail,
> Thunderbird and Evolution however the problem is still the same.

So, I'd say that the problem is not located in your client. It could
be a problem in the connection or in the server.

> I think that Windows is running some kind of service that Linux does
> not.

Or maybe is _not_ blocking some services that you are in blocking in
Linux. Like ident, dns checking...

> Any ideas?

Run tcpdump during the connection and see which ports/connections are
attempted/established.

Davide

--
My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath
September' because it actually tells you something.
-- Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx)

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> I am running SuSE 9.3 on a 2.8Ghz P4 with 1G RAM. I have a fair amount
> of experience with Linux so technical details are welcome.
>
> I have correctly configured Linux email clients to read mail from my
> IMAP server at work, however they are all very slow. It takes around 2
> minutes to refresh the contents of my inbox. I have tried with KMail,
> Thunderbird and Evolution however the problem is still the same.
>
> On the same machine I have Windows 2000 running on vmware virtual
> machine. If I use Thunderbird from within vmware using exactly the same
> settings, it works fine and there are no delays.
>
> I think that Windows is running some kind of service that Linux does
> not. I've tried running an identd daemon but that doesn't make any
> difference. Maybe I could do something with a samba server. Any ideas?

Neither samba nor ident have anything to do with running an IMAP client
correctly.

The relevant questions here are:
1. exactly *what* IMAP server are you connecting to ?
2. are there differences in the network config between those two OSes ?


My advice is to boot up Knoppix and connect from there, preferably with
Thunderbird since that is what you use on Windows.

Then start testing.

Davide Bianchi wrote:

> Or maybe is not blocking some services that you are in blocking in
> Linux. Like ident, dns checking...

Evolution, and perhaps the other two, makes use of spam filtering which - if
I recall correctly - uses DNS lookups. So the reading of inboxes would be
sensitive to DNS performance.

In addition, Evolution (and likely any mail client) is very sensitive to
settings such as frequency of checking inbox, to which files rules are
applied, which files should be cached, etc. "Minor" configuration changes
can make a huge difference.

Be sure that both instances of Thunderbird you're using for testing have
identical configurations.

- Andrew