#2795 new
James Riordon

New large mailbox - all messages have "Unexpected server response"

Reported by James Riordon | April 2nd, 2021 @ 10:24 PM

This is a new install of Mailmate with 6 IMAP accounts (just bought Mailmate), each account having several mailboxes. One mailbox, that has over 110K messages in it, is getting this error for each and possibly all messages:

Unexpected server response

MailMate could not fetch the message with UID 9 in the mailbox “Inbox Archives/Company Inbox Archive” in the account “192.168.1.4”. This is not the actual message in your IMAP mailbox, but a message generated by MailMate as a replacement dummy. MailMate has repeatedly tried to fetch this message, but the server cannot provide it.

On the last attempt the server error message was as follows:

Reading ended without error.
How to retry

You can use “Message ▸ Reset...” if you want to force MailMate to retry.

Looking the logs for this mailbox I see this:

21:53:20 S: * 110726 FETCH (UID 110733) <--- this is line number 9976 in the logs, all lines are the same with sequential IDs
21:53:20 S: * 110727 FETCH (UID 110734)
1:53:20 S: G6 OK Fetch completed (0.749 + 0.000 + 0.748 secs).
21:53:20 C: G7 UID FETCH 110735:* (INTERNALDATE)
21:53:20 S: * 110727 FETCH (UID 110734 INTERNALDATE "15-Jan-2021 12:27:33 -0500")
21:53:20 S: G7 OK Fetch completed (0.001 + 0.000 secs).
21:53:20 C: G8 UID FETCH 1:110734 (UID FLAGS) (CHANGEDSINCE 112337)
21:53:20 S: G8 OK Fetch completed (0.001 + 0.000 secs).
21:53:20 C: G9 UID FETCH 28 (UID BODY.PEEK[] RFC822.SIZE)
21:53:20 Error: Reading ended without error.
21:53:20 S: <<< terminated reading >>>
21:53:20 Completed action (1006). Observed read/write timeouts: 8/8

21:53:20 Handling reply
21:53:20 Running action
21:53:20 Sending request (30)
21:53:20 Handling request
21:53:20 Ready to run action (retry count: 0)
21:53:20 Fetching bodies for mailbox: Inbox Archives/Company Inbox Archive
21:53:20 C: G10 NOOP
21:53:20 Error: Writing ended without error.
21:53:20 Error code: 10
21:53:20 Failed action (1006). Reset observed read/write timeouts: 8/8

21:53:20 Handling reply
21:53:20 Running action
21:53:20 Sending request (53)
21:53:20 Handling request
21:53:20 Trying to disconnect nicely (8)...
21:53:20 C: G11 LOGOUT

After 2 days only a little over 2000 messages have tried to sync, with the same error above. Is there a way to resolve this issue, so that the last of all my mailboxes can successfully sync to Mailmate?

Is it possible the mailbox has too many messages in it?

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • James Riordon

    James Riordon April 3rd, 2021 @ 05:51 PM

    Splitting the mailbox into 2 separate mailboxes of ~55K emails each, the issue goes away. I would be curious to know if this is a limitation of Mailmate or the mail server. One of them seems to be not correctly handling the quantity of emails.

  • benny

    benny April 7th, 2021 @ 03:29 PM

    • State changed from “new” to “closed”

    From the perspective of MailMate, the mailbox cannot have too many messages.

    MailMate has this fallback-warning to avoid busy-looping when a server repeatedly fails on the same action, e.g., by cutting the connection. This has been a problem in the past with some servers. Based on your logs I cannot see if the failures are random or if it happens with the exact same message every time. The problem might not be the size of the mailbox, but a specific message and then it was somehow “fixed” when you made the mailbox smaller. (The issue could be that requesting the message made the server IMAP process crash due to a disk issue or something like that. Not all IMAP servers are robust. Just a random guess.)

    I'm a bit worried that UIDs are very close to message numbers in your output. This indicates that you very rarely delete emails in the mailbox. It's not a problem if this is how you handle the mailbox, but otherwise it's a sign that the server resets UIDs which it shouldn't do, but MailMate should warn you if this happens.

    Let me know if you have more issues.

    Thanks for the support!

  • James Riordon

    James Riordon April 7th, 2021 @ 04:21 PM

    Thank you for the followup. Regarding your worry... I rarely delete messages, would be the correct answer.

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