Outlook can't do IMAP



  • So a nonprofit I volunteer for recently got a new board who were fed up with thunderbird (rightly so I think because the search function is horrible by todays standard) and wanted Outlook. So I installed Outlook 2013 for them and called it a day.

    Fast-forward 10 days and I get warnings that 75% of our colocated server montly bandwidth is used up. I check our monitoring and see that we've used about 800GB... on december 5th. I also see than in november we've used over a TB. In comparison, our highest usage until then was 160GB/month and 50GB/month is average.

    I immediately go into damage control mode, thinking the server has been compromised and is used as a seedbox or something. The only thing I see is about 4MB/s of IMAP traffic from our office IP, which isn't very strange as it was morning and the office just openend. I do some checks but cannot find anything. Until I notice that the IMAP traffic doesn't let down but constantly keeps at about 4MB/s (about our downstream in the office) for a over an hour.

    It turns out that Outlook 2013 just downloads every email from upto 2 years ago every time you sync with a IMAP server . It's supposed to be patched recently but that didn't work for us.
    I understand that most people will use Exchange with Outlook but seriously Microsoft, how can something like this go past QA?



  • IMAP with GMail has been a pretty ripe mess in previous versions, so I'm sure they won't fix it any time soon.



  •  

    What EXACT version are you running?  Is it 15.0.4551.1005 or higher?


  • @TheCPUWizard said:

     

    What EXACT version are you running?  Is it 15.0.4551.1005 or higher?

    I wouldn't know the exact version, but it was the fully patched dutch version on december 7th which still gave the problems. Right now they're using Outlook 2010 and I'm not really in the mood of doing yet another Outlook 2013 install.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dtech said:

    It turns out that Outlook 2013 just downloads every email from upto 2 years ago every time you sync with a IMAP server
    You should be aware that Microsoft has a history of really not understanding how to get a good IMAP implementation. I used to have exactly the same problem but in reverse; Thunderbird and the particular version of Exchange we had installed just could not seen to avoid downloading my mailbox again (and again, and again…) Thankfully this has been fixed for a few years now, but the level of traffic involved exposed a number of problems in a whole bunch of things.



  • @dkf said:

    @dtech said:
    It turns out that Outlook 2013 just downloads every email from upto 2 years ago every time you sync with a IMAP server
    You should be aware that Microsoft has a history of really not understanding how to get a good IMAP implementation. I used to have exactly the same problem but in reverse; Thunderbird and the particular version of Exchange we had installed just could not seen to avoid downloading my mailbox again (and again, and again…) Thankfully this has been fixed for a few years now, but the level of traffic involved exposed a number of problems in a whole bunch of things.

    So you had better QA because of someone else's buggy software... Was that a good thing or a bad thing?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Jedalyzer said:

    So you had better QA because of someone else's buggy software... Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
    Bad, IMO. I'm not a developer of either Thunderbird or Exchange, so why should I do QA for them? Worse would have been if it never worked at all, of course, but even so.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    @Jedalyzer said:
    So you had better QA because of someone else's buggy software... Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

    Bad, IMO. I'm not a developer of either Thunderbird or Exchange, so why should I do QA for them? Worse would have been if it never worked at all, of course, but even so.

    It's a particular product that you're QA-ing, but your system, which has multiple components that you've integrated for them.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    It's a particular product that you're QA-ing, but your system, which has multiple components that you've integrated for them.
    Well I grew tired of the weird crashes and bandwidth chewing very rapidly. (I could've switched mail client, but the other options at the time sucked more in UI terms.)



  • This reminds me, I need to check if 32-bit Outlook 2013 still crashes when downloading certain messages over IMAP (tried to set up my boss with Outlook 2013 and an IMAP mailbox - Outlook crashed halfway through downloading e-mails, and would then crash while the splash screen was shown; I managed to isolate one of the messages that caused it to crash, but MS support wasn't really helpful).


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