After sending large email using IMAP, get error when copy the email to "sent" folder "server timeout error" SOLVED by disabling Avast Antivirus
Current using Thunderbird beta version 64.0b1, but same problem occurs in stable releases since a few months ago.
After successfully send emails with attachments of >1MB size, Thunderbird cannot copy the email into the "sent" folder on the IMAP server. Get server timeout error. This occurs with bot secure (SSL), and non secure connections to the IMAP server. The popup window during the sync process indicate copying the email to server, then sending login information when it hangs until timeout and ask to retry. However, refreshing the "sent" folder on the server showed there are sometimes multiple copies of the email, so it seems like Thunderbird has tried to few times to copy the file. I have reduced the connection to server cache limit down to 4, 3 and 1 but the error still occurs. I tried sending the same email using Foxmail and Sylpheed and they worked without any problems. So this seems to be a fault with Thunderbird. This problem do not occur when sending emails of ~500KB.
Any help to fix this problem would be appreciated. /Ken.
Modified by Wayne Mery
Chosen solution
tried stopping your anti virus scanning sent mail, or all mail as the scanning causes more trouble than it saves.
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Chosen Solution
tried stopping your anti virus scanning sent mail, or all mail as the scanning causes more trouble than it saves.
Following your advice, I have turned off all email anti-virus scan (using Avast), the problem did not occur for sending both 1.5MB and 8MB emails. However, just turning off SMTP anti-virus scan was not enough to fix the problem, all email anti-virus scan has to be turned off.
Thanks Matt for your help. /Ken.
you might want to enable the "allow anti virus program to scan incoming mail in options > anti virus.
That writes each incoming mail to a file in the temp folder on your computer and waits a couple of seconds for the anti virus to scan the file then incorporates the file into Thunderbird. If the anti virus quarantines or deletes the file you get all sorts of somewhat opaque error message from a Thunderbird which has just lost the file. But mostly is is a trade off. you get mail scanning and the occasions odd error.
Matt said
you might want to enable the "allow anti virus program to scan incoming mail in options > anti virus.
Avast anti-virus scan setting allows the options to switch off: (1) POP3/IMAP scan (incoming email) (2) SMTP scan (outgoing email) (3) NNTP scan (newsgroup).
I have tried with just switching off SMTP scan as sending email was the issue, however the error still happens. I have to turned off both POP3/IMAP and SMTP scans to stop the fault. In conclusion, I have to stop all email scanning (both incoming and outgoing), at least with Avast Antivirus in order to prevent this error from happening. I'm not too concern as I don't click on hyperlinks or attachments that's a bit suspicious.
> In conclusion, I have to stop all email scanning (both incoming and outgoing), > at least with Avast Antivirus in order to prevent this error from happening.
So everything is good now?
Wayne Mery said
> In conclusion, I have to stop all email scanning (both incoming and outgoing), > at least with Avast Antivirus in order to prevent this error from happening. So everything is good now?
Yes, all good large emails can be sent now.