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Getting IMAP error 3825948

Recently, a couple of customer systems have had some dropped IMAP connections for no apparent reason. The only error returned is 'error 3825948'.

Usually, this is rectified by closing the email program (usually Thunderbird in this instance) and re-establishing the connection.

I decided there must be some reason for this, so I plugged in the packet sniffer to see what was happening.

The answer was simple: When some of our customers were 'roaming' between mobile cells, their IP address was changing. This was causing the IMAP server to drop the connections and send TCP RST packets to the new IP of the 3G dongle modem.

This is an example of where greater information from the end-user would have been more helpful than what we'd been given. If we'd been told that the issue only affected laptops when they were using 3G mobile data (and only then whilst they were moving), this issue could have been tracked down much more quickly. Moral of the story: provide as much information as you can when raising or escalating support tickets.