[Dovecot] All mail in mbox disappears when using Outlook

[Adam McDougall]

Frank Leonhardt wrote:
> Timo Sirainen wrote on 03 August 2009 20:11:
>   
>> On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 20:03 +0100, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
>>     
>>> Any suggestions about where I could look for a clue will be followed up
>>> immediately. I'm new to Dovecot, but not BSD. My next step will be to
>>>       
>> put a
>>     
>>> network analyser on it.
>>>       
>> Looking at the imap traffic could help, especially if you can reproduce
>> "works" and "doesn't work" cases. You could use also
>> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Debugging/Rawlog
>>     
>
> I saw that a few weeks back and thought I'd give it a go - the analyser
> looks less scarey ;-)
>
> I've had some progress. The problem was the same on 1.1.16. However, if I
> rename the mbox file to something completely different (rather than adding a
> suffix as I had done before) it all suddenly starts to work. The old file
> was called "inbox090630". It doesn't like "inbox090630-1" but it's okay
> about "Inbox-09-06-30". Moving the file name back makes everything disappear
> again. Unsubscribing and subscribing alone makes no difference.
>
> It's obviously looking like an internal Outlook problem. I'll check it out
> with other IMAP servers and see if I can confirm it. However, I'll let
> Microsoft fix it themselves.
>
> Thanks for all your help!
>
>
>   
This sounds like an issue I've noticed with Outlook myself, in that 
whenever it sees
a mail folder starting with the word "inbox" (whether it is "inboX" or 
"iNbOX" or
"inbox-dfsjaf"), Outlook always looks for "Inbox" or "Inbox-dfsjaf" (it 
uppercases the
I and lowercases the "nbox" before passing the request to the backend).  
Thus when
I was converting my users from UW imap mboxes to Dovecot IMAP, I took 
care in
my conversion script to rename folders on their behalf if they start 
with "inbox"
so they are "Inbox" instead.  Also, if you have a mailbox called 
"Inbox", Thunderbird
will not see it since it is hidden by the real inbox. 

Workarounds in perl:
        # If a folder is named Inbox, thunderbird will not see it.  Rename.
        $target =~ s/^inbox$/Inbox-renamed-by-migrate/ig;

        # If a folder starts with inbox (any case, eg. INbOX) Outlook 
won't see it properly.
        # Outlook expects Inbox(something) or bust.
        $target =~ s/^inbox(.*)$/Inbox$1/ig;