[Dovecot] Outlook 2003 Client

[William Blunn]

On 10/08/2010 10:51, Richard Gliebe wrote:
> my dovecot IMAP Server (1.0.7-7.el5) is now up and running ;-)

Congratulations. You just installed an old unsupported version.

If you want help from the list, you need to be running 1.2.x or later.

If you distro includes an older version, then that is not considered to 
be an acceptable excuse. You should take steps to mitigate that, for 
example sniffing around for a binary package for 1.2.x, or installing 
from source.

> Now I want that all clients have to save there sent messages in the 
> IMAP folder on the server.
>
> no problem with the thunderbird clients.
>
> BUT, I can't configure the office 2003 clients to save there send 
> messages to the imap folder.
>
> Some people told me, that outlook 2003 isn't able to do that.
> The send messages folder have to be a "local" folder and not a folder 
> on the IMAP server. I can't believe.
> The only way on outlook 2003 is to create a messages filter ....
>
> very strange ....

In my experience, Outlook support for IMAP is sucky generally.

Looking at the landscape, it probably always will be. Microsoft wants 
you to pay them $$$ to run Exchange Server, so it is in their interest 
to only support IMAP as an afterthought. There will be just enough 
support so that people who happen to already be using Outlook won't be 
immediately prompted to switch to something else. They only need to make 
the IMAP support just good enough so that the pain of switching to 
another program is more than the pain of putting up with the poor IMAP 
support. Microsoft's thinking seems to be that if people are still using 
Outlook they *might* one day switch to Exchange Server, but if they have 
switched to some other client, they will likely never switch to Exchange 
Server. But they musn't make the IMAP support too good otherwise people 
won't have any reason to switch to Exchange Server.

If you aren't even using Exchange Server, then there is little point 
using Outlook.

Outlook has enough other suckiness as well --- it has no concept of "no 
font", so will always stamp the author's font on to outgoing messages, 
even if the author wasn't intending to specify a font. Plus you will 
likely get several kilobytes of pointless stylesheet tacked on to every 
outgoing message.

Plus the authors don't seem to have heard of format-flowed, and instead 
seem to think it is a good idea to join together separate lines based on 
heuristics rather than following the established standards.

Altogether, I wouldn't touch Outlook with a bargepole.

If you aren't using Exchange Server, then I see little point in using 
Outlook, given the easy availability of superior solutions, e.g. 
Thunderbird.

Bill