[Dovecot] great disappearing email mystery

[Scott Silva]

on 2-12-2009 10:35 AM Maarten Bezemer spake the following:
> 
> On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Scott Silva wrote:
> 
>> Outlook does not store IMAP mail in its PST. PST's are only used for
>> the local
>> storage. Outlook does not crash if your IMAP mail folders are larger
>> than 2
>> GB, although its IMAP implementation is pretty bad.
> 
> Outlook DOES store some kind of cache of IMAP mail in a PST. And that
> PST is always located in the Local Settings directory, regardless of
> your system-wide default location of PSTs.
> I don't know what happens when this cache PST reaches its 2GB limit...
> 
It would take a LOT of messages to cache 2 GB of headers.

> Related: I sometimes have people complaining that some emails don't show
> up in Outlook (2003) but are listen on webmail (Squirrel). Typically,
> users have 'hide messages marked for deletion' set. Changing that to
> show all messages makes the 'missing' mails visible, but they are then
> not marked for deletion.
Outlook also clashes on the POP3 side if the user has their check for messages
frequency too low. I think it trips over itself and locks up. Only a full
restart of outlook or sometimes a reboot of the PC will make it start again. I
don't let users have their check frequency any less than 10 minutes, although
repeatedly hitting the "Send/Receive" button will also lock it up.
This is also an Outlook problem, along with users that think e-mail is an
instant messaging application.

Outlook was designed as an Exchange client. Everything else was added as an
afterthought. Thunderbird with Lightning works better than Outlook, but not a
lot better.
> 
> (Running the etch-backports 1.0.15 version of dovecot-imapd currently)
1.1 seems to be slightly better with Outlook, or at least my Outlook users
haven't been complaining as much. They could be resolved to the fact that it
just doesn't work very well. You won't find it in any Debian repo that I know of.

> 
> This looks like it's an Outlook problem, but if a workaround at
> dovecot's side would help, I would be very happy.
> 
Do you have outlook-idle set in the config file for pop3 and IMAP?

> Regards,
> Maarten
> 


-- 
MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!

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