outlook 2013

[Bob Miller]

I am trying really hard to wrap my head around why people insist on
using this program...

Where I have outlook 2013 users, I have had nothing but problems getting
their mail to work with imap.  my solution has been to set them up with
pop, which works just like it always has.  Or move them to a different
program.

recently, I have a customer who requires multiple machines, all using
outlook 2013, to access the same email address, so pretty much have to
use imap.  if I set up just one of the machines with imap, it works more
less as expected, with hiccups such as mail taking an hour or two or
more to show up.  But shortly after I connect a 2nd machine to the same
account, one or both machines start to go wonky.  Symptoms include
deleted items returning, read messages becoming unread again, and
duplicates being constantly created and deleted.  The last I can confirm
by watching in webmail and refreshing the inbox every few seconds; as
mail shows up and deletes in outlook, so it does in webmail too.

On my test machine connected to the same server, I have evolution,
outlook and thunderbird all connecting to one account with no problems.
Well, outlook hiccups, but it's not unusable.  And I have other users on
the system that share email accounts across a variety of other clients
and platforms, including older versions of outlook.

I have tried checking message rules, there are none; removing all folder
subscriptions; running scanpst, which finds errors even before the
account finishes syncing and ever time I run it after that; I have
looked for viruses/malware; I have confirmed there is no forwarding or
some trickery happening on the server; chkdsk and similar hardware
checks all come up clean, the computers are only a couple of months old;
I have got certs set up with SANs and the CA installed such that outlook
does not error on the certificate; and I have tried just about every
combination of settings that seem relevant.

The one thing that does seem to work, at least for a few minutes or an
hour or two, is deleting and recreating the accounts on one of the
computers.  But the problem inevitably returns in short order.  

Surely people have outlook 2013 connecting via imap to dovecot without
problems; is there some special trick that google is hiding from me?  
-- 
Computerisms
Bob Miller	
867-334-7117 / 867-633-3760
http://computerisms.ca