Sunday, January 13, 2008

When in doubt, test.

Shortly after I last upgraded my mail server, one user reported that his mail client was failing to connect with the message:

"Unable to connect to your IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server..."

He was the only one known to be having this issue, so after a cursory check of the server with no obvious problems, I suggested that this might be an error on his end, such as connecting to the secure IMAP port without using SSL/TLS. Occam’s Razor suggests that a server error is more likely than a client error which just happens to coincide with a server upgrade, so I eventually decided to dig up some infrequently used commands and perform a thorough analysis.