Logins occasionally take forever (Mac)

[DanRaisch]

I just switched from an old mail server running on an old Mac mini to a new Mac mini (2023).
The old mail server uses the same sort of software as the new one, dovecot, postfix, fetchmail, etc.

When using the old one, Thunderbird would occasionally require quite a lot of time to successfully log in, as if it had used a bunch of retries and was now waiting a minute or two for the next retry. But I thought it was just having trouble logging into the old Mac mini.

I see the same behavior between Thunderbird and the new mail server hardware with up-to-date mail suite, including dovecot. And the new machine is dedicated to the mail server software.

I've closed TBird several times while this happens, to reopen it and continue to require a long time to log in.

It's not all the time; once it logs in I can read a series of messages pretty quickly.

Does anyone else have the problem while using this combination of software?

Thanks!

-Mike

[mtalbot]

Yes!

I'm running Postfix and Dovecot on an up-to-date Debian server and have exactly that problem. I'm also having the same problem accessing Google and Office 365 accounts.

I'm running Thunderbird (102.9.0 64-bit) on a Debian computer (also up-to-date) for those who want to know.

[crenelle]

I'm trying to enable the logging capabilities to watch how things operate as per https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging
and I have done the following:

imap - mailnews.imap.loglevel string, set to All
ldap - mailnews.ldap.loglevel, string, set to All
NNTP - mailnews.nntp.loglevel, string, set to All
OpenPGP/e2ee - logging is described at OpenPGP Debugging
pop3 - mailnews.pop3.loglevel, string, set to All
smtp - mailnews.smtp.loglevel, string, set to All

I'm not seeing very active logging. What should I enable to follow connection attempt traffic, since that seems to be the issue I'm trying to resolve. (I may have to re-acquaint myself with tcpdump and wireshark...)

Tnx! -m

[mtalbot]

It would definitely be worth using tcpdump and wireshark to check the network activity. From what I saw, it looked like there was some sort of problem with DNS lookups and that was slowing everything down. Except that it only happened to very specific domains/IPs, other accounts in the same TB profile loaded very fast!

[crenelle]

I was trying to debug the delays and stuff by simplifying everything, disabling most, etc. It looks like Dovecot is very unfavorable toward port 143 usage. It really prefers using port 993 (with SSL/TLS enabled). I did that and Thunderbird and Dovecot appear to get along much better.

I had tcpdump running for a while, watching traffic initiated by TBird and seeing the server ignore it for long stretches of time. I was also watching the mail server logs.

The integrated logging page in TBird isn't very useful for chasing this problem.

Thanks!

Regards,

-Mike