maybe we should start a thread listing the other hosting companies that allow more IMAP connections.then LP might figure it out! its too bad that my plan was renewed just a month before this all happened, otherwise I wouldn't be stuck using POP for some of my emails and IMAP for others. THANKS LUNARPAGES!

* - edited by Mitch for advertising

I really don't understand why Lunarpages is being so stubborn about opening it up to 8 simultaneous connections from the current 4.  It's not like you need all 8 all the time, but just for brief bursts.  For 4 more simultaneous connections for some number of milliseconds every 5-10 minutes did not to me seem worth getting a dedicated hosting service, and I'm reading from this forum that others agree with that assessment.  I think LP should either relent on this, or offer an alternative that represents the added value in a competitive way.  Just my opinion, of course.

Myself and at least one other person raised tickets.  The only solution we were offered was to upgrade to dedicated hosting.  Not only were they made aware of the issues, I went to lengths to find the instructions they needed to increase the connections to 8. 

I'm surprised that more people have not reported this issue, but then perhaps not so many people use IMAP at home or in small businesses. 

Well, I think LP has a pretty good package, and if all a domain's users stuck to POP mail there would be no problem.  The issue here is with LP sticking to the default number of IMAP connections per unique IP with Courier Mail.   For the limited number of IMAP users, I don't think it would hurt to increase from 4 to a total of 8 simultaneous connections. From this topic, that's all people want them to do.

LP's concerns are that by doing so it will increase the amount of memory used by Courier Mail.  I don't believe it will increase it by much, and some of LP's competitors seem to agree. Obviously if it increases it beyond a marginal amount, it will impact other services and they won't be able to host as many domains per server, which wrecks their business model.

I doubt posting here would make LP change their settings. If people are having problems as discussed here, they should open a ticket with LP and reference this topic.   Maybe if someone could convince them to try it on one shared host, they'd consider the change overall.  So, if you've not opened a ticket, go for it. 

That's excellent!   It might help if you indicated which server host you are on.  It could be useful information for someone else with a similar issue.

ya, it looks like they did it on the pala server too. i'm not having any issues now.  and it seems like the limit is quite high now. i set my cached connections to 10 per email, and opened 3 accounts at once. and only after trying to open all the folders, and probably having 15-20 connections, did it drop me.

i'm very glad they fixed it, but disappointed in the customer service in dealing with this problem. hopefully they'll learn from this one.

I found a solution which may interest other IMAP e-mail users of Lunarpages and Apple Mail.

There is an option in Apple Mail (Tiger 10.4 and Leopard 10.5) to "Automatically Check Changed Mailboxes" in the Advanced section of IMAP account preferences.

When this is checked, it initialises as many as 10 connections at once, causing problems for the new limits on IMAP connections which surely would have been causing traffic issues for Lunarpages. The number of these connections is not manually adjustable.

If one unchecks this option, Apple Mail will only open connections when needed. This seems to have solved my problem.

Lunarpages have not adjusted the option up for SPICA, I wish they would.