On 03/06/2018 01:51 PM, Jerry wrote:
George,
We run Dovecot with Outlook, and have had similar problems
when Outlook is operating in "Offline Mode". When you're in
offline mode, doing any folder-level operations, such as Copy,
Create, Rename, Move, Delete, etc. causes problems with the
mailbox. The end result is that you could lose e-mails and
entire folders that were involved in the offline operation.
How we have fixed this in the past, what we have done is:
- Do an Outlook "export" of the entire contents of the IMAP
account into a ".pst" file. (This saves the e-mails that may
be at-risk of being lost.)
- Delete the IMAP account in Outlook, which includes the
".ost" file.
- Delete the IMAP account on the Dovecot server
- Reconfigure the IMAP account in Outlook
- Restore the IMAP contents from the ".pst" file in step #1.
- Educate the user about not doing folder-level operations
while in offline mode.
Hope this helps...
Thanks,
John
I did as you state above with a little variation and it works
thanks for the hint. My
changed sequence is (for anyone with same trouble) :
1. Export the mails into a pst (while off-line) . Don't be alarmed
if you DON'T see some of your messages
in the pst afterwards it's another bug we have to thank MS for,
you have to change the default view
to IMAP on some folders to see the emails (go figure why you have
to do so in a pst...)
2. Delete the ost used by the account (or rename it if you wish,
just to be sure) .
3. Let outlook refetch all messages from the server again ( to be
sure I counted the
size of the users maildir on the folder and waited for the ost to
come close and report no more
downloading, close one or two times outlook to be sure).
4. Import the previous pst back into outlook with the no
duplicates option .
After that the mailbox was in sync with no mail missing. I just
hope that was a one time glitch but to be sure
I instructed the user to be cautious while working from home and
report if he sees signs
of not syncing . I'm not confident though that it will not happen
again .
On Tue, 6 Mar 2018 10:22:36 +0100, Jakob Curdes stated:
Thanks,
that means that outlook is useless as an Imap client then . This is
the whole idea behind
imap, to be able to do work while off-line and sync changes when
on-line or I get it wrong ?
thanks anyway
I would see it a bit more general: Outlook is mostly useless as email
client in general (not looking at the groupware functionality). Even
with Exchange or other server types, many simple things do not work
reliably and never get fixed.
And the simplest things are impossible, e.g. displaying the full email
address of a sender instead of the name only (to make it harder to spoof
senders). I suspect 2016 is the 2nd-last version of Outlook to be
released and from then on it will be browser-only.
That said, IMAP support is "strange" and has always been - OL trusts its
own .ps ort .ost file more than the server which circumvents the general
idea of IMAP. If you need Outlook, avoid IMAP and if you need IMAP,
avoid Outlook....
JC
What version of Outlook are you using? I have "2016 (16.0.9029.2016) 32-bit
installed and it does not exhibit the problems that you allege it does?