Dovecot max user ip connections

I noticed that my phone kept failing to log in to the server. Looking at the logs, it seems that I was exceeding the max number of user ip connections limit.

I don’t know what the default is, but in the symbiosis dovecot.conf it said

protocol imap {

mail_max_userip_connections = 30

but that isn’t there in the Sympl equivalent.

Putting that line into /etc/dovecot/sympl.d/40-imap-settings/10-plugins has made the problem go away, but presumably it was removed in Sympl for a reason.

What was the reason? Am I going to hit a snag?

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The default is 10, which should be enough for the vast majority of users, however some clients can be badly behaved and open a seperate connection for every subscribed folder, and/or don’t close old ones, expecting them to time out eventually.

Bumping it up to 30 should solve your problem, but I’m not sure if it will just cause other problems later down the line.

If you do make changes, you’re best adding them to new/seperate files so they don’t cause an issue later on when you come to update the packages.

I found that giving different (or even the same) settings in a separate file simply prevented Dovecot from starting up, so I had to edit the “dist” file.
Seems that Dovecot is a bit picky. Perhaps it’s related to Bind9