Thunderbird Connection Timeout

Background

CS Specific

• Increase to 300 seconds
  • We often see problems in our mail server (mail.cs) when email client programs start creating multiple Imap sessions when the system is running slowly. This has the effect of exacerbating the problem and may bring the entire server down. By default, Thunderbird is configured to retry making a connection if it doesn't receive a complete response after 29 seconds. When mailboxes are large and the server is busy, it can easily require more than 29 seconds to complete a mail update. So, it spawns another session - leaving the old one behind. The number of processes builds up on the mail server until it eventually refuses to process mail at all. Not good.

UW specific

Steps for the configuration change (Thunderbird 38.3.0 and newer)

• Preferences -> Advanced Tab ->General -> Config Editor
• Search _> mail.server.server
  • find mail.server.serverNN.timeout (where NN is 1,2,3... ) * double click on the timeout value (29 seconds as of version 38.3.0)