# WTF is with Outlook and IMAP?

## VanDan

Greetings.

I've been asked to migrate a company's email to their Linux server, and upon 1st inspection of their setup, I've found some interesting issues.

They insist on using Outlook 2003. They're currently connecting to their ISP's IMAP server. This combo is doing some strange things:

- Sent email not being copied to the sent folder

- Deleted or moved messages remaining in the current folder, but with a line through them

- Weird connection ( disconnection ) issues

I've done a little searching around, and found that you can make a 'rule' in Outlook to copy sent items to the sent folder. This seems less then perfect, but at least it has the desired effect.

The only 'solution' I've found for the deleted / moved messages remaining in their original folder is to 'purge' the deleted items from the current folder. This is also dodgy.

Is this as good as it gets? If it is, then I'll just set up a POP3 server. None of them seem to know what IMAP or seem interested in the benefits. But if I can get IMAP working a little better with Outlook 2003, I'll give it a go.

I plan on using courier-imap, by the way. So does Outlook suck this bad, or what?

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## morodoch

Which IMAP server are you using?

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## VanDan

Well, to be honest I don't know what they're on at the moment. They're using their ISP's IMAP service. They're got a squirrel webmail system, if that means anything ... I think you can use squirrel with a number of IMAP servers though.

They want me to migrate them to their own server. I plan on using courier-imap if I can get it working nicely, but it will depend on whether Outlook actually plays nice with IMAP at all. I've only ever used Mozilla / Thunderbird with IMAP, and I've had great successs. I'm not particularly interested in having to create custom rules on each Outlook client just to get their sent items in the sent folder etc.

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## kezzla

Yes outlook will work fine. The only thing I don't like is when you delete messages. You have to "purge" the deleted items manually via "Edit" then "Purge Deleted Messages". Until then you see a line through the mail which is annoying as phek. I'm not using linux as my mail server anymore, but when I did courier-imap and uw-imap both had worked fine with outlook.

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## Dr_Stein

Outlook is a FARKING PIECE OF CRAP. It really is. It SUCKS.

For the "Line through deleted messages:"

View | Arrange By > Current View > Hide Messages Marked For Deletion

Now, for the Sent thing..

"When you send a message from Outlook, the message will be stored in your local Sent Items folder. It will not be stored in the sent-mail folder within your IMAP space. Outlook considers the folders Sent Items, Deleted Items, and Drafts as special folders that cannot be part of your IMAP space and must be local folders." - this is true. I have confirmed it with a Microsoft engineer myself. (At my last job, I set up a sweet Courier-IMAP setup, and the TWO PEOPLE that used Outlook were nothing but a pain in the f**ing ass. Everyone else used Thunderbird or the Mozilla Suite and were very very happy.)

IMAP rocks, but Outlook 2003 just plain sucks as an IMAP client. Anyone that says it's a good IMAP client is an idiot. If the company is small enough, then using POP3 might be a better option - however, you have to take into account email backups. Gotta save those .pst files!

Are there any reasons as to *why* they want to use Outlook? Sadly, that's why people often wind up with an expensive Microsoft Exchange server when they have like 10 people in the whole company. Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 is what they end up with... and that poorly configured Exchange Server, just for stupid crap like shared calendaring. Usually, it's more buzzword compliance than anything else. And, for shared calendering, the Open Source world really has been a total and complete failure. 

I'll be honest. Gentoo might not be the best solution for this situation. You might want to check into Scalix instead. Well, that is, if they're really stuck with Microsoft Outlook 2003.

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## marcion

 *Dr_Stein wrote:*   

> Are there any reasons as to *why* they want to use Outlook? 

 

Well the client is the client. They may want to use shared calendars and mistakenly believe that is the easiest way. 

If you did want to approach that, rather than tying to fight the wind with Evolution or Thunderbird, a better solution may be to offer an alternative that runs in parallel. If that alternative is actually better then they will eventually migrate one at time.

A web-based email/calendar solution can have numerous benefits. For example, the users can work away from the site without phoning the helpdesk for an hour a day when they are at a conference and need their email or calandar.

These two FOSS projects might be of use:

Hula

Horde

I know Horde at least can be installed alongside Squirrelmail with neither getting in each other's way.

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## Dr_Stein

 *marcion wrote:*   

> [
> 
> These two FOSS projects might be of use:
> 
> Hula
> ...

 

True, but those solutions are just a little better than Squirrelmail's Shared Calendar plugin. The thing is when you need to get into more complicated calendaring stuff, like re-scheduling, showing free/busy time, delegating proxy rights, scheduling resources (like projectors, conference rooms, etc) and emailing & accepting invitations. Those are all things that the web solutions simply do not have. That may change one day, but for now it's still an issue that keeps people tied to Exchange & Outlook. 

Even last year, if someone using the Mozilla Calendar add-on sent a calendar invite to another user using Mozilla Calendar, the recipient wouldn't be able to do something as simple as adding the invite to their calendar with a double-click. It would just open the .ics folder in the browser and display the text. Very confusing for users.

Another alternative is Oracle Calendar. It's a cross platform application, and it works very well.

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## Akaihiryuu

The internal email where I work uses IMAP too.  The regular agents here are not allowed to install any software, so the only choices are Outlook Express or the company webmail (which actually uses Horde/Horde-Imp, even though they've customized the interface a bit).  Outlook/Outlook Express do not actually support IMAP.  They have stripped down IMAP support, it basically treats IMAP as if it's POP3 set to leave the messages on the server.  They are not capable of using IMAP folders.  I ran into that when I was a lower level agent, so I had to use the webmail.  There was no way of saving sent messages using OE.  As soon as I got promoted, I installed Thunderbird on my machine pronto.  Now I can save my sent email on the IMAP server.  The entire backend of this place is Linux, though I don't know what distro they use.  Everything from the Windows network to the roaming profiles, to the internet access and the internal email, this entire place is run on Linux.  But the average person working here would never know, as all of the agent desktops are really crappy 1.7 GHz Celeron Win2k machines.  They are probably the slowest machines I've ever used, my old K6 is faster than these things for everything but flash.  I'm pretty impressed with Horde though, I've installed it on my Gentoo server at home (along with postfix and courier-imap) so I can check the server email (all the machines send their cron emails to my account on the server).  It works okay for webmail, though it does do the "line through deleted message then purge" thing that you mentioned Outlook doing.  I haven't dug too deeply into the configuration, but I assume that's a behavior that can be changed.

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## Dr_Stein

 *Akaihiryuu wrote:*   

> Outlook/Outlook Express do not actually support IMAP.  They have stripped down IMAP support, it basically treats IMAP as if it's POP3 set to leave the messages on the server.  They are not capable of using IMAP folders.  I ran into that when I was a lower level agent, so I had to use the webmail.  There was no way of saving sent messages using OE.  

 

What? This is totally incorrect. I have no trouble saving Sent Items on the IMAP server with Outlook Express. It can and does use IMAP folders. I run an ISP and get that question all the tim and have been writing setup documentation for it. See http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/pcmail/outlookexpress/oe-config.html step #11 and step #13 for the Sent Items issue.

Now, regular *Outlook* - it's very difficult to get it to save sent items on the server. This is true. Even worse is that the Google results you'll get usually pertain to Outlook 2000, and Microsoft has changed behaviour in Outlook 2003, rendering the documentation for Outlook 2000 almost useless.

But *Outlook Express* most certainly can save sent emails on the mail server and can use IMAP mail folders. I do it all the time.

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## ketjap

For outlook express and Courier-imap you have to set your INBOX path to: INBOX.

For outlook express with WU-imap you have to set you INBOX path to: ~/Maildir (so I believe).

With such a setting your able to create folders on your imap server. Outlook will pick a default folder for his sent items and stores it nicely there.

Maybe you can telnet your imapserver at port 143 or 993 for SSL imap to identify the imap software what is used on the server?

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