Outlook 2013/2010 nightmare

Sun Mar 8 04:20:48 UTC 2015

Hi All,

This is my first post so forgive me if this hits the wrong list.

I have been using dovecot for years happily with SendMail on mainly 
CentOS servers, and my customers are starting to more and more use 
Thunderbird, so my perfect model is:

Linux --> Dovecot --> SendMail --> Thunderbird (or mobile phone e-mail app).

I do have some customers using Outlook or Windows Live Mail, and these 
are for the most part working fine with IMAP - I don't do POP.

My mod to the dovecot.conf file:

disable_plaintext_auth=no

My mod to conf.d/10-mail.conf:

#mail_location =
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u

My mod to conf.d/10-master.conf:

#default_internal_user = dovecot

service imap-login {
   inet_listener imap {
     port = 143
   }
   inet_listener imap_second {
     port = 10143
   }
   inet_listener imaps {
     #port = 993
     #ssl = yes
   }

- I do the 10143 bit so I can pseudo hide port 143 for clients with 
devices that access both internally and externally - port forwarded on 
MikroTik routers for my customers.

All goes well for many years with the above configs, and continues to be 
awesome as always.

Under the user's ${HOME} directory they end up with a lovely 'mail' 
directory and all of the e-mail client folders live in harmony under there.

This weekend I am helping a customer cut over his customer from legacy 
POP based e-mail uses with splatterings of Outlook 2010 and 2013 
throughout the company, to using Linux with IMAP in the setup as 
described above as per my standard configs.

The issue starts when you add an IMAP user to the Outlook client and 
upon opening it, initially, it tries to find a "Sent" Items folder under 
IMAP to send from. To this end I have traditionally gone into the 
dialogue box that opens, click on the IMAP account to receive a list of 
possible folders, but it now immediately crashes indicating Outlook has 
had an error, and it all goes to hell from there. Outlook then cannot 
open but keeps crashing with its "unknown error".
Up to last week at another site with Windows Live Mail, this was not an 
issue.

By modifying the e-mail account via Control Panel, I can delete or 
modify the account and try again.

Here is what I found:

If I don't specify a 'root' folder under the "Advanced" tab which also 
contains the port selections for 143 and 25, it fails.

If I follow the MS recommended root folder example from Microsoft and 
use INBOX, or Inbox, it 'does' stop the error but you can't create 
subfolders - I am assuming as this is picking up the .imap/INBOX folder 
or something and makes sense that it can't create folders under 
INBOX/Inbox, particularly if this is a file rather than a directory that 
dovecot/Outlook are pointing to.

What I have found is I can 'lie' to Outlook and put in a 'mail' folder. 
This results in a ${HOME}/login_name/mail/mail folder, but I don't care, 
as it happily puts files under mail/mail.

Now here is something totally strange: If I try to put this same account 
on another PC so users can 'share' the same e-mail account, even with my 
'mail' root folder work-around, it crashes again.

All through this, Thuderbird works fine and so does RoundCube - SOGo 
will be up and working a bit later once I get the initial part up and 
going... but I digress but good to know it is only Outlook doing this.

To share multiple accounts I am currently getting the subsequent PCs 
that need to share a universal account to select a root folder mail2, 
mail3 etc. I then delete these folders and symbolic link the mail2, 
mail3 etc to the mail directory - yucky fix, but kind of works with some 
auto scripting of .subscriptions to follow so all of the Outlook clients 
sync to the one 'real' root folder.

I have never seen this before and have customers running all kinds of 
IMAP e-mail clients to dovecot on Linux.

I saw an MS posted bug on something for IMAP and they recommend rolling 
back MS updates to fix it - but I am not sure the client can or will do 
that.

This kind of random issue that only affects this site at present is why 
I only recommend people use e-mail clients like Thunderbird because it 
just 'works'. The users at this site would not switch and will cite they 
have been working in a POP situation on their other Linux box since Adam 
was a boy.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

I like to think I can do this with my eyes shut by now, but this one has 
got me stumped.

-- 

As always, I remain at your service.

Kindest Regards,
David.M.Clark (Director - Senior Linux/UNIX Consultant)
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