Inquiry regarding Mail app resilience when one of multiple accounts is unreachable

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Hello everyone,

I have been using the Nextcloud Mail app with multiple accounts, and generally, it works very well. However, I recently encountered a specific scenario that I would like to understand better to see if I can improve my setup or if I’ve found a potential edge case.

My Environment:

  • Nextcloud Version: Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn (32.0.3) – Running via Nextcloud AIO

  • Mail App Version: 5.6.5

The Scenario:

I have three separate mailboxes configured in the app. Yesterday, one of my email providers performed scheduled maintenance, which made that specific mailbox unreachable for several hours.

During this period, when I tried to open the Mail app, the interface failed to load, and I was presented with a blank white page (WSOD). Neither the top toolbar nor the side navigation appeared. Once the provider’s maintenance was finished and the server was back online, the Mail app started working perfectly again.

I would like to ask the community and the developers:

  1. What is the intended behavior of the Mail app when one of several configured IMAP/SMTP servers is unresponsive?

  2. Is there a specific configuration or a timeout setting I should check to ensure that a single failing connection doesn’t prevent the entire app interface from rendering?

  3. Are there any best practices for maintaining access to the functional mailboxes when one account is temporarily down?

I want to ensure that I haven’t missed a configuration step that would make the application more resilient in these situations. I am happy to provide logs or further details if needed to help diagnose if this is an environmental issue or a bug.

Glad for your time and for the continued work on this application.

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For me it sounds more like an edge case. Mostly, you suppose that for all the tests that the mail server(s) is available. What the developers intended or did not, I’d rather discuss directly with them on github by reporting your issue.

From a user perspective, I’d expect to use the other still working mail accounts. For the non-working I’d expect a notification of some sort (either an error message, a symbol to the folders of this mail account), and then it could be temporarily disabled (to not run into timeouts all the time, and then recheck from time to time if it is available again).
The second part to anticipate this state, it might be a lot of work for some edge case that is not happening often.

A blank white page is a bad user experience that should be avoided.

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I have reported it on Mail GitHub.

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ref: Inquiry regarding Mail app resilience when one of multiple accounts is unreachable · Issue #12199 · nextcloud/mail · GitHub

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