Dovecot ignoring maximum number of IMAP connections

Solution 1:

I recently had occasion to change this value, but I changed it in the main config file; in my /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf it now says:

protocol imap {
  mail_max_userip_connections = 50
}

And it's been honoured; this is using dovecot 2.0.9 on a Centos 6.2 system. I don't know that that's an answer to your question, but I thought it might be useful for you to know that someone else had got it working, and how.

Solution 2:

Add mail_max_userip_connections = 50 in the global section, not in protocol imap or protocol pop3 sections. At least after doing so my dovecot -a started to return the requested value for mail_max_userip_connections and not the default 10.

I'm running Dovecot 2.0.9 on CentOS.

Solution 3:

To me, the answer with the hint to the global section seemed to work.

Changed first only in ./conf.d subdirectory, but that didn't work and the E-Mail client continued in showing the error message as before with the value of 10 max connections. Tried a lot with always restarting the server, but as it was a brand new installation, I had to look into more details.

As this parameter wasn't set before, I inserted it here (dovecot.conf):

    ...

    # Protocols

    mail_max_userip_connections = 100

    !include_try /usr/share/dovecot/protocols.d/*.protocol

    protocol imap {
            mail_plugins = $mail_plugins imap_quota
    }

    ...

May be, the value can be reduced later, but that needs testing as many devices are simultaneously checking for new mails.