If your email account is not syncing, and you are seeing an error message which says that there are 'Too many simultaneous connections', please read further to find out why, and what you can do about this.
All IMAP email servers have a limit on the number of connections that are allowed to be active at the same time. If too many applications, whether web-based (such as Gmail) or client based (such as Mailbird) or even mobile applications, try to connect to your email server at the same time, one (or more) of these will be denied of access to the IMAP server, which will result in no emails coming through.
As you will see by clicking here, Gmail has a limit of 15 connections. By default, Mailbird will use 5 connections all the time, and if you combine this amount of connections used by Mailbird with all the other ways in which you are connecting to your emails (such as via your mobile device, laptop, or web browser) then 15 connections will at times be insufficient, because each method of accessing your inbox will never only use 1 connection.
Suggested approach
Here's how you can reduce the number of connections used by Mailbird:
- Open the Mailbird menu in the top lefthand corner (i.e. the three horizontal lines).
- Click on Settings.
- Navigate to the Accounts tab.
- Select the email account which is experiencing these issues, and then click on Edit.
- At the bottom of the next menu, you will see a connections slider. Set this one to 2 (as shown below).
- Naturally having more connections is always better, but if you're experiencing long delays when checking for incoming emails, then you need to limit the number of connections used by Mailbird in order to see an improvement.
- If you see no improvement after you have set it to 2, then please set it to 1 and check once again to see if anything has changed.
We would also advise you to limit the number of connections where possible in any and all other email clients or devices you are using - simply reducing the number of connections used by Mailbird may not be sufficient to rectify the problem if other applications are overusing available connections.
Hopefully this article was helpful, but if you require any further assistance, please feel free to contact our Customer Happiness Team by clicking here.