Outlook 2013/2010 nightmare #2

[David.M.Clark]

Yes Eric,

Outlook also has a declaration that as of either version 2010 or 2013, 
they no longer download IMAP headers, they download the whole message - 
thank God for faster Internet connections these days - could you imagine 
that in the older dialup days? Still it is a waste of bandwidth and disk 
space to do this.

I am so tired of how they claim to use the RFC and indicate they are 
'compatible' with a certain protocol/procedure, but really just move the 
goal posts so you can only talk to M$ stuff at the back end using their 
enforcements.

All part of locking people into the "perpetual upgrade" path I guess.

On 03/10/2015 10:22 AM, Eric Broch wrote:
> Not only does M$ Outlook not work well with others, it strips headers I
> use for training spam filters.
>
> On 3/9/2015 5:48 PM, David.M.Clark wrote:
>> Hi All and my sincere thanks to Jakob and Joseph for your responses.
>>
>> I got around the nightmare for this site but it is far from
>> satisfactory and given both Thunderbird, Roundcube and the Android
>> e-mail client work perfectly as expected, this following links
>> comments enforce what I experienced over the weekend:
>>
>> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.dovecot/79231
>>
>> I have not struck this for other sites using Outlook 2013 (though I
>> continually banter that Outlook version 'anything' is designed for MS
>> Exchange and nothing else), but then again I have not had Outlook
>> needing to share the same e-mail accounts across PCs.
>>
>> So the bottom line for this particular site is:
>>
>> Set the "Root Folder" for IMAP in outlook to "mail". This is messy
>> from my beloved Linux command line perspective in that you end up with
>> ${HOME}/login_name/mail/mail. But it does work and stops the Outlook
>> crashes.
>>
>> If you set it to the Outlook recommended "INBOX" or "Inbox", you can't
>> see or access subfolders.
>>
>> Now here comes the ugly part of Outlook 2013 using IMAP to Linux (at
>> least for this site):
>>
>> If you want to share a single e-mail account across multiple PCs
>> running Outlook 2013, you _cannot_ use the "Root Folder" of "mail" as
>> I have indicated above. The workaround is to create each subsequent PC
>> with a "mail2", "mail3" etc folder (without the quote marks of
>> course). If you set up two PCs with the same Root Folder, the new PC
>> crashes out of Outlook and eventually so does the original PC. The
>> only way around this is to delete the identity and PST files in
>> Outlook and strictly set them up again to different "mail" something
>> folders. Almost reminds me of the old MS "Share Violation" issue :-)
>>
>> So after the user is set to the mail2/mail3 folder and it appears
>> under the user's original "mail" folder, you then have to blow away
>> the mail2/mail3 folder and then do a symbolic link to the mail folder:
>>
>> ln -s mail mail2
>>
>> In this way, both users on the PCs will be seeing the same IMAP
>> folders, being mail and mail2 on two different PCs. Naturally to add a
>> third PC to this would be "mail3" etc.
>>
>> Now the other ugly part of this is you also need to update their
>> .subscriptions file in ${HOME}/login_name/mail to show folders like:
>>
>> mail/Sent Items
>> mail/Junk E-mails
>> mail2/Sent Items
>> mail2/Junk E-mails
>>
>> Given you would need to manually do this above, and is just not
>> suitable, I have written two scripts to automate this process  and it
>> works cleanly so far.
>>
>> The first script does the automatic removal of the mail2/mail3 etc
>> directory and creates the symbolic link, the second script is used to
>> redo the .subscriptions file if the contents of the 'mail' directory
>> change.
>>
>> You may need to mod these but I have a cron running as root to do this.
>>
>> Script 1 (mail_root_enforce):
>>
>> =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------=
>>
>> COMPLETE_HOME=/u/home
>> cd ${COMPLETE_HOME}
>>
>> for USERHOME in *
>> do
>>     ls -d ${USERHOME}/mail/mail? | while read CHECKME
>>     do
>>       JUST_CHECKME=`basename ${CHECKME}`
>>       if [ -d ${CHECKME} -a -L ${CHECKME} ]
>>       then
>>           #echo "${CHECKME} is ok"
>>           :
>>       else
>>           echo "${CHECKME} is _not_ ok"
>>           cd ${USERHOME}/mail
>>           rm -rf ${COMPLETE_HOME}/${CHECKME}
>>           ln -s mail ${JUST_CHECKME}
>>       fi
>>     done
>>     cd ${COMPLETE_HOME}
>> done
>> =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------=
>>
>>
>> Script 2 (mail_multi_users):
>>
>> =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------=
>>
>> cd /u/home
>>
>> for THIS_USER in *
>> do
>>    MORE_THAN_1=`ls -d ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail* | wc -l`
>>    if [ "${MORE_THAN_1}" -gt "1" ]
>>    then
>>        # echo "${THIS_USER} has more than one"
>>        ls ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail >${THIS_USER}/subcount
>>        if [ ! -f ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last ]
>>        then
>>            >${THIS_USER}/subcount_last
>>        fi
>>        ISDIFF=`diff ${THIS_USER}/subcount ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last |
>> wc -l | awk '{print $1}'`
>>        if [ "${ISDIFF}" -gt "0" ]
>>        then
>>            # echo "Is Different"
>>            ls ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail >${THIS_USER}/subscription_tmp
>>            >${THIS_USER}/subscription_new
>>            for ROOT_MAIL_DIR in ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail*
>>            do
>>              MAIL_BASE_NAME=`basename ${ROOT_MAIL_DIR}`
>>              cat ${THIS_USER}/subscription_tmp | sed
>> "s:^:$MAIL_BASE_NAME/:g" >>${THIS_USER}/subscription_new
>>            done
>>            cp ${THIS_USER}/subscription_new
>> ${THIS_USER}/mail/.subscriptions
>>            chown ${THIS_USER}:popusers ${THIS_USER}/mail/.subscriptions
>>            cp ${THIS_USER}/subcount ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last
>>        fi
>>    fi
>> done
>> =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------=
>>
>>
>> You will note the ${HOME} directories are all under /u/home so if you
>> do sadly need to use these scripts, please change the /u/home to suite
>> the ${HOME} location set on your server. I prefer to run this as root
>> to enforce things and not have any funny permission errors, and also
>> to save needing to run multiple instances for multiples users.
>>
>> One annoying caveat that the site will have to get used to: the mail2,
>> mail3 folders do show up when using good e-mail clients like
>> Thunderbird, SOGo, Roundcube or Android e-mail client. This is because
>> they are seeing the contents of the .subscriptions file. I haven't
>> looked into Dovecot doco for possible multiple .subscription files to
>> make the folders bit look 'nicer'. I will look at something like
>> 'namespace' to see if this might help. Please bear in mind this was in
>> an emergency to get things at least 'working' so the users were happy
>> when they hit the office on Monday.
>>
>> A documented story for your perusal and use if you are 'stuck' like I
>> was. I will continue to try and see if there is a more elegant
>> work-around but for now, this is all I can come up with.
>>
>> PS: I notice everyone suppresses their e-mail footer so doing the same
>> here :-)
>>

-- 

As always, I remain at your service.

Kindest Regards,
David.M.Clark