[Platemail-developer] Re: whatzzup

[Neil C. <ba...@th...>]

[ CC ing back onto the devel list]

On Wednesday 30 March 2005 03:28, you wrote:
> Neil Campbell wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > Not really - the issue of limiting connections is all understood, the
> > question was more one of what to do when you find you've run out.  As I
> > understood it, the better way was to open a connection for each mail box,
> > so you don't have to keep SELECTing to move around, but your comments
> > above seem to discourage this course of action.  If I do open a
> > connection for each, the question is how to recover sensibly when I try
> > to open the 5th one, if Courier has annoyingly stopped me from having
> > more than 4.
>
> On the contrary, I quite strongly suggested that your should maintain
> separate connections for each mailbox, precisely because SELECT is so
> expensive.  You can move about with SELECT, but you shouldn't if it's
> avoidable.

Ahh, then I am confused.  I thought you'd suggested that Outlook's folly was 
its use of separate connections?  Perhaps I've misunderstood.

> Assuming Courier at least picks up the phone it would probably issue a
> NO response to the client's opening volly.  Actually that's rubbish,
> since NO is a context sensitive response that has formally defined
> meanings.  For example NO to a LOGIN means bad password, and NO to a
> CAPABILITY (normally the first command run on establishing a connection)
> is undefined.

> It would seem the only valid thing Courier could do is not pick up the
> phone, so to speak, but that's into questionable territory (it could be
> valid for the client to take this for the server going down) --
> certainly it's outside the scope of the RFC.  You could try to recover
> using a SELECT in an existing connection, but then you're writing the
> client wrt to a specific server and that's just not a good idea.
> Certainly having the client code around this would fall into the
> catagory of "heroic measures".

Yes, this is the problem.  Courier refuses to accept any further connections 
at all (the way I eventually worked out what was happening was to open a load 
of telnet sessions, the 5th of which got refused).  Coding around it at the 
client end would be pretty awkward for me, I think, as I don't have direct 
control over how many connections Javamail will use.  The ultimate result, as 
far as I can tell, is that if there are 5 folders, I will never be able to 
see the 5th one as there will be a connection for each of the others.

> What happens when you use telnet?  Or you use Thunderbird against this
> mailhost?  Does thunderbird handle it?

Telnet just has the connection refused.  The problem was documented on a 
Courier mailing list when someone was trying to use Thunderbird against a 
similarly configured Courier server, because Thunderbird defaults to using 5 
concurrent connections.  I couldn't reproduce the problem with Thunderbird 
though, so perhaps more recent ones handle it better.

> >>Why on earth would anyone want a vi plugin?  Lot of crazies out there.
> >
> > You could put one into emacs to improve it, for a start.
>
> Emacs already has a vi emulation mode, which I imagine has been in there
> since the days we first drew breath.  Bring on the pain.

Finally, a feature worth using :-)

Neil