OutLook support

[Andrea Venturoli]

On 2020-09-05 03:11, Deborah Pickett wrote:
> On 2020-09-04 18.30, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
>> What's the status of interoperability today?
>> Will OL 2013 work reliably with CyrusIMAP 3.0? 3.2?
>> What about newer versions of OL? 
> 
> Hi Andrea,

Hello.



> I can offer anecdata of interoperability between Cyrus 3.0.x and Outlook 
> 2016 from ten months of experience.

Thank you very much for sharing.



> Like Outlook in general, it works fine, until it doesn't. With ~40 users 
> with mailboxes up to 15 GB in size, I've had to help users start with 
> fresh Outlook profiles about half a dozen times when their Outlook data 
> file got corrupted.

Nothing new here: when I said pre-2013 version worked, what I meant is a 
~50 users installation required 2-3 reconfigurations per month.
I can live with that.
Of course using ThunderBird would mean max. 2-3 per *year* or even less, 
but it's up to the customer to choose.



> Some specific observations:
> 
> Like any IMAP account in Outlook, you lose the ability to tag messages 
> with colour.  All you can do is flag or unflag a message.

Fine, I guess.



> Outlook does not handle the \Deleted flag well, and it has a habit of 
> showing messages which are \Deleted as if they are still present 
> (especially in Drafts). I recommend configuring all clients sharing an 
> account with Outlook to purge folders early and often.

True, I remember that.
Showing deleted messages with an overstroke and forcing the user to 
"delete twice" was puzzling most of my users.



> Outlook respects special-use folders about as well as other IMAP 
> clients, which is to say, not super-well.  If you try to change which 
> folder is the Trash folder using cyradm, Outlook may not notice the 
> change.

Fine as long as I can set this up for a new account.
Then I can always delete/recreate.



> 64-bit Outlook is needed if both (a) your data file is > 2 GB, and (b) 
> you want search indexing to work.  With 32-bit Outlook, search will 
> silently miss messages.

:-O
Thanks for pointing this out!



> Outlook is inefficient at IMAP synchronization.  If you have large 
> mailboxes, it can spend a lot of its time synchronizing subscribed 
> folders.  There are ways of winnowing the list of folders that Outlook 
> tries to sync during Send And Receive, and this helps a bit.

Now I remember this too...



> Outlook by default wants to send read receipts.

What I found really annoying is "non-read" receipts.
In case a user loses view of a shared folders, OL will send a "non-read" 
receipt for any unread message, potentially queueing thousands of 
messages in a few seconds!
This could be turned off in older versions; on post-2010 the option is 
either not there or hidden.
 >:-<



> To sync Outlook with Cyrus contacts, calendars and tasks, the free 
> Outlook CalDav Synchronizer add-in works well (but sync rules are 
> tedious to set up, and I haven't found a way to deploy preconfigured 
> sync rules to users).  Outlook tries to disable the add-in because it 
> slows down startup, but you can prevent this with a registry setting.

Thanks again.
I don't think I'll need this soon, but it's useful to know.



> Rarely, Outlook will decide that a folder is local-only, and any 
> messages moved into that folder will stop syncing with Cyrus.  The only 
> fix I have found is to create a new Outlook profile (and then hunt for 
> lost messages to drag back under synchronized folders).

Yes, I remember this too :-<
Does it at least shows the folder is local?
Then I could train the users to stop using it and call me.



> These corruptions seem to occur more often in "Other Users" and "Shared 
> Folders", but this might just be because said folders are huge (> 4 GB) 
> in my company.

I hope I don't need to use this, at least for now.



> Of course, it's unlikely that any of these irritations will ever get 
> fixed by Microsoft.

That's sure.



> In the long term, I am considering migrating my 
> users from Outlook to Thunderbird or webmail.

All the users of my servers are using TB (along with mobile devices and 
occasionally RoundCube).
Now I'm evaulating installing a new instance at a customer who is 
already using OutLook (so to overcome the limitations of their ISP, 
which only offers POP3).
I'll suggest they move to ThunderBird but:
a) habits are hard to lose;
b) some use a management software who might require OL :-(



  bye & Thanks
	av.