Delays in collecting messages with Mac Mail

[Brian Awood]

We've seen somewhat similar behavior with the Apple Mail client in the past.  
My guess is it's IDLE related.  If your using Apple Mail that came with 10.5, 
it's IDLE implementation appears to work at first.  However it has a bug in it 
so that it stops working after a while.  It seemed related to how it managed 
different connections to the server,  using a different connection for each 
folder you opened.  It is more reliable in the version that comes with OS X 
10.6. 

However we've also seen very strange behavior in Apple Mail when it's local 
cache gets corrupted somehow.  You can try using the Mailbox->Rebuild option, 
but typically the most effective way I've found to correct it is to go into 
Preferences:Accounts and remove the account that has the problem, then restart 
Apple Mail and reconfigure the account. 

-Brian

On Thursday 04 February 2010 11:06:41 Simon Fraser wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm running the debian package of cyrus in lenny, 2.2.13-14, and I've
> encountered some odd behaviour with Mac Mail that I'm struggling to
> explain.  Emails that have been successfully delivered sometimes fail to
> appear in Mac Mail clients for many hours.
> 
> I'm currently uncertain if it's being caused by cyrus or Mail.app,
> although it has only started happening since we moved from a compiled
> 2.2.12 version to the debian package on new hardware - we migrated the
> mailboxes using the cyradm 'xfer' feature.
> 
> Exim's mail logs report successful delivery, and the timestamp of the
> file in the cyrus spool matches the delivery time.  If checked with
> another email client, such as squirrelmail, the emails are in the
> mailbox. I'll mention that our squirrelmail installation connects using
> imap through a perdition proxy, just for completeness, but there are
> some users who have experienced this delay without using any other email
> clients.
> 
> Using the example of one of our sysadmins yesterday, an email was
> delivered into his mailbox at 10:09.  It appeared in Mac Mail at
> approximately 4pm.  In the intervening hours, other messages were
> delivered and appeared in Mac Mail; I also see several successful logins
> from his mac to the imap server, regular opening of "INBOX.Apple Mail To
> Do" and so forth.  During that time he had no other email client open. I
> also checked and found that Mac Mail was configured to use the 'IDLE'
> command, which, when manually testing it, appears to be working
> satisfactorily.
> 
> Has anyone encountered something like this before?
> 
> Thanks,
> Simon.
>