Re: [Marketing Mail] Outlook vs. Cyrus

Whilst your topic is on thread, my reply isn't going to be, so apologies 
to everyone in advance for that.

When we used outlook as our email client pretty much all the problems we 
had were with the OST bloating to the maximum permitted size, at which 
point you can't even delete mail to reduce the size. This is because 
outlook keeps the local copies of everything on the IMAP server 
essentially in the one file. You can of course use PSTs to move mail off 
the IMAP server into smaller files on the local machine, but then they 
aren't accessible from anywhere which is surely the reason most of us 
choose IMAP over POP?

I do seem to recall there were some oddities with the way it handled 
some interactons with Cyrus, but as far as I could ever work out, the 
fundamental problem lies in outlook, and I think they happen no matter 
IMAP server you use, if you keep all your mail on the server.

One problem was users thinking they had created subfolders in the shared 
folders structure on the IMAP server, but which were actually not 
visible on the server (even to admins) and as far as I could tell only 
existed in the users OST and not online.

The work around I adopted was to switch from mailfile to maildir storage 
in the client, that is local cached copies are stored in a directory, 
one file per email, instead of all in one massive file - it probably 
takes up more disc space on the client machine, but it saves loading the 
entire cache to RAM every time you open your mail client, and it means 
you never end up with one file that is too big for either the client or 
OS to handle properly.

This feature was not in Outlook at the time, I convinced my boss to 
switch to Thunderbird in order to be able to use it. I am not sure if 
other mail clients have a maildir option now. Thunderbird has been 
working well for me for some time so I haven't done a recent review of 
other clients I don't think it fully implements everything cyrus is 
capable of providing so please don't take this as a promotion for that 
particular client, there may be better ones. It does seem to handle the 
shared folders properly as well.

I should add the the OST bloat issue was mainly one user, the boss, who 
receives hundreds if not thousands of emails per day because he signs up 
to every mailing list going and is terrible at spam management. I did 
get to a point where my own OST was sometimes doing it though as a 
result of sending large engineering files back and forth. The shared 
folder issues affected users with much smaller OSTs as well though.

So, as I said before not completely on topic because my solution to 
problems between Outlook and Cyrus was to ditch Outlook.

Regards

Jim

On 13/01/2022 11:08, Vladislav Kurz wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> please what is your experience regarding cyrus and outlook (2016/365)?
> We notice problems especially with users that have large and bushy 
> mailboxes - >10 GB, >100 subfolders.
>
> Specifically:
>
> - sync gets stuck - one (sent) mail cannot be synced from outlook to 
> cyrus, and that stops any further receiving and sending of mail. I was 
> able to identify the problematic mail using communication dump 
> (/var/lib/cyrus/log/username/) and after deleting it from outlook, 
> sync recovered.
>
> - other times deleting OST file and resyncing it from imap helped
>
> - user with two mailboxes on the same server - one mailbox stopped 
> being checked for new mail until outlook/computer was restarted. The 
> other mailbox was checked all the time. Perhaps IDLE could help, but 
> we were unable to find where to enable it in outlook.
>
> - flaky search, AFAIK Outlook searches only using it's local cache, 
> ignoring any search/squatter capabilities on the server.
>
> - moving mail from one folder to another says "item cannot be moved, 
> because the message was modified". After clicking on other mail and 
> back it can be moved just fine.
>
> And maybe other similar problems usually solved by restarting outlook, 
> computer, deleting ost, or creating new clean outlook profile and 
> starting over.
>
> Have others found similar issues regarding outlook + cyrus (or any 
> other imap server)?
>
> Have you found some tweaks that could improve how outlook and cyrus 
> cooperate?
>
> Our imapd.conf extract:
>
> altnamespace: no
> unixhierarchysep: no
> hashimapspool: true
> search_engine: squat
> delete_mode: immediate
> expunge_mode: default
>
> We are running cyrus 3.0.8 (debian 10), and considering upgrading to 
> 3.2.6 (deb 11) or 3.4.2 (deb 11 + backports), or migrating to dovecot.
>
> Do you have any experience if oulook works better newer versions of 
> cyrus, or some other IMAP servers?
>
>

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