So I had the great idea to change the protocol I use to get mail from my university form POP3 to IMAP.

In theory, I would have auto-synchronizing folders, and an encrypted connection to the mail servers.

In practice, half the time I’m in Brazil I can’t talk to the servers because of “number of IMAP connections exceeded”, and when I do manage to talk to the servers, It is super slow (every move folder operation must be relayed back to the server), and I’m getting lots of weird white empty messages that wont load. Basically, I can’t be reliably reached by my university e-mail, which sucks.

Worse thing is: I tried to move back to POP3, but I’m getting the weird white blank messages there to — whenever I try to open them, thunderbird hangs for a while.

Any suggestions are welcome.

EDIT (28/08/12): I have “solved” this problem by going back to using POP3, and deleting the messed up messages from my mailbox directly on the mail server. So much for new protocols. I wish I could understand exactly what went wrong, though.