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,
I can offer anecdata of interoperability between Cyrus 3.0.x and Outlook
2016 from ten months of experience.
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.
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.
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.
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. That said, it's not as bad as Windows 10 mail, which flat out
refuses to respect special-use folder tags at all.
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.
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.
Outlook by default wants to send read receipts. These invisible
messages can silently clog up the outbox, preventing any messages from
being sent. It is a very good idea to disable sending read receipts
entirely; I have set a Group Policy object to do this. I've had to use a
free program called MFCMAPI to manually delete queued read receipts that
accidentally got through.
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.
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).
Renaming a folder, or moving it somewhere else, in Outlook usually
works. Rarely, it'll make the folder local-only. A slightly more
robust way of renaming a folder is to make a new folder with the new
name, and move the contents of the old folder over to the new folder. I
have seen this fail too.
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.
Of course, it's unlikely that any of these irritations will ever get
fixed by Microsoft. In the long term, I am considering migrating my
users from Outlook to Thunderbird or webmail.
Hope these data points are useful.
Deborah
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