Courier-imap-ssl has been flaky for a long time, but now, it turns out it’s been very unhappy with current Thunderbird. Even after manually playing with the TLS settings, it was a beast.

So, I installed dovecot. One line for maildirs, one line for ssl enable, copy over my ssl keys, and set EXIM to use SASL instead of Courier. Poof. Everything *just works*.

While I was at it, I set Thunderbird sort and threading defaults (so I don’t have to set it on every folder individually), and that also is wonderful.

I don’t like having to subscribe to all of the folders manually (I have around 590 folders, one for each project, for each customer, for each partner, plus about 10 tech archives), but if I want it to save everything locally, I cannot just uncheck “show only subscribed folders” and expect it to work.

BUT, really, swapping over and doing all of the manual reconfig was way less time than trying to figure out why Courier was not working. (It was probably something to do with it not being updated any time in the last several updates I’ve tried.)

Now, I’d really like if TB would use an Outbox folder, rather than demanding SMTP, I could switch work over to IMAP vs Exquilla…