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