Ok, I see. Perhaps this is the reason for the different behavior. We use the T-Bird-Version 2.0.0.12 at all 30 Clients. As far as I know, the 3.0 is not released for productive use yet.

Anyway, I agree, that T-Bird has this problems with any IMAP-server not allowing both folders and messages.I tested 6 of them so far. Although the problems look slightly different with each one of them, the problems exist all the time.

Hello all together,

first of all, I have to apologize for my bad English, but it's not my native Language. I hope, everything will be at least understandable.

I am an System Administrator for a company in Germany, that uses the "AVM Ken!" Mail-Server for years and everything worked fine. But now we had to change the internal mail access from pop3 to IMAP and the problems began. The IMAP-Implementation of Ken! seems not to be out of it's test phase. The Program suddenly shows random crashes, mail access was very slow, characters (especially "German Umlaute") were changed into funny little signs, and much more problems. So the search for an alternative began.

 For about one week we are now testing mercury and are quite satisfied with it. The programm runs absolutely stable and offers a lot of features. But there are some questions left, that I didn't found answered in the help.

First, a short overview of the configuration there. There are 21 local users, that use about 40 different eMail-Adresses. We are connected to the Internet via DSL (6 MBit) and receive the mails via pop3 from the provider. As I said before, the local Clients are using the Server via IMAP. The Mail Client is Mozilla Thunderbird for all Users.

And here are my open questions:

- How is it possible to assign one eMail-Adress to different users? First I tried to fill in the local users in the Pop3-Client Configuration for this Account, divided by a ",", but it did't work. Secondly, I tried to establish a global filter rule, triggered by the "to" field in the header, selected "copy to another user" as action, also filled in the local users in the parameter field, divided by a ",", but it didn' work either. So I had to create one single filtering rule for every user, that shall get a copy of this mails. Is there a special syntax to divide local user names? Or is there any other, probably easier way to make different local users receive the same mail, send to a specific adress?

- Strange behavior when creating folders in thunderbird: Creating folders that contain messages is no problem. But every time a folder is created, that should contain other folders, the folder is not shown immediatly. Thunderbird has to be restarted to show the new folder. Is there any solution for this problem? By the way, this is the only point the users are really unsatisfied with: That a folder only can contain mails OR subfolders. Some of the users have 20,000 Mails ore more in their clients, well structured in folders and subfolders, but nearly every user had mails AND subfolders in his root folders and in the inbox. So we had to change the folder structure in every client when migrating to mercury. No Fun to do this, really. It costs hours and hours...[:P]

- Renaming Folders in Thunderbird is not possible. Every time we try this, we get the error message "No such folder".  After a few restarts of Thunderbird, the renamed folders appear as new folders, beside the old folder name.

- Also deleting folders in Thunderbird is not always sucessful. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I could not find any reason, whether it sometimes works and sometimes not.

 All the described "folder problems" in Thunderbird do only occur with mercury, it seems. I tried all those things with Thunderbird and three other IMAP-Servers, and everything worked fine.

Last question: The old Mail-Server had one very handy feature, called "smtp-forwarding". It allows to sent mails for a local user directly to another Mailserver, using a specific user name and password of this server. This was sometimes very helpfull, when the server of the provider was unavailable for some reasons and error messages send to the admin reached the receiver anyway, because these mails weren't send through the providers' server, but directly to my own mailserver. Is it possible to establish this functionalty in mercury somehow?

Many questions, I know, perhaps lots of them will cause a silent laughter at the specialists in this forum. But, as the Subject says, Mercury is a new Software-Package to me and in the moment I am very glad, that it simply WORKS! After 4 weeks of further testing, the company owner wants to decide if Mercury shall be bought. When at least a few of the problems can be solved within this time, then I think, the chances are quite good.

 Thanks for the help of everyone in prior,
with greetings from Germany,

Michael.
 

[quote user="Bladeinger"]- How is it possible to assign one eMail-Adress to different users? First I tried to fill in the local users in the Pop3-Client Configuration for this Account, divided by a ",", but it did't work. Secondly, I tried to establish a global filter rule, triggered by the "to" field in the header, selected "copy to another user" as action, also filled in the local users in the parameter field, divided by a ",", but it didn' work either. So I had to create one single filtering rule for every user, that shall get a copy of this mails. Is there a special syntax to divide local user names? Or is there any other, probably easier way to make different local users receive the same mail, send to a specific adress? [/quote]

 Use alias

[quote user="Bladeinger"]- Strange behavior when creating folders in thunderbird: Creating folders that contain messages is no problem. But every time a folder is created, that should contain other folders, the folder is not shown immediatly. Thunderbird has to be restarted to show the new folder. Is there any solution for this problem? By the way, this is the only point the users are really unsatisfied with: That a folder only can contain mails OR subfolders. Some of the users have 20,000 Mails ore more in their clients, well structured in folders and subfolders, but nearly every user had mails AND subfolders in his root folders and in the inbox. So we had to change the folder structure in every client when migrating to mercury. No Fun to do this, really. It costs hours and hours...[:P][/quote]

Mercury IMAP doesn't support subfolders and messages in the same folder. A folder can have either messages or subfolders.

[quote user="Bladeinger"]- Renaming Folders in Thunderbird is not possible. Every time we try this, we get the error message "No such folder".  After a few restarts of Thunderbird, the renamed folders appear as new folders, beside the old folder name.

- Also deleting folders in Thunderbird is not always sucessful. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I could not find any reason, whether it sometimes works and sometimes not.

 All the described "folder problems" in Thunderbird do only occur with mercury, it seems. I tried all those things with Thunderbird and three other IMAP-Servers, and everything worked fine.[/quote]

The only way to track this down is to analyze session logs generated by the MercuryI module

[quote user="Bladeinger"]Last question: The old Mail-Server had one very handy feature, called "smtp-forwarding". It allows to sent mails for a local user directly to another Mailserver, using a specific user name and password of this server. This was sometimes very helpfull, when the server of the provider was unavailable for some reasons and error messages send to the admin reached the receiver anyway, because these mails weren't send through the providers' server, but directly to my own mailserver. Is it possible to establish this functionalty in mercury somehow? [/quote]

again via alias but can't deal with username/password pair - the message flows via MX resolver.

As a small note: A lot of effort is currently within the beta process undergoing IMAP and POP3 concurrent connections.

Hello Peter,

thank you for your quick answer. Unfortunatly, the "alias-solution" for sending the same mail to a group of users doesn't work either, I tested it a few minutes ago. Tried to add them separated by comma, tried to add them per "FILE", even tried to set an extra alias for each local user. As far, the filtering rules for every user seems to be the only solution.

With the "Folder-Problems", I will look forward to the next release.

The alias is no real solution for the SMTP-Forwarding, as it can't be combined with username and password, as you said. Perhaps a point for the wishlist for future releases...  

Michael. 

I just realized that I probably posted in the wrong sub-forum. Could any site-admin or moderator move this thread to "Community technical support"? Thank you!

> Hello all together,
>
> first of all, I have to apologize for my bad English, but it's not
> my native Language. I hope, everything will be at least
> understandable.

Yous English is a lot better than my German. Actually probably better then my English. ;-)

>
> I am an System Administrator for a company in Germany, that uses the
> "AVM Ken!" Mail-Server for years and everything worked fine. But now
> we had to change the internal mail access from pop3 to IMAP and the
> problems began. The IMAP-Implementation of Ken! seems not to be out
> of it's test phase. The Program suddenly shows random crashes, mail
> access was very slow, characters (especially "German Umlaute") were
> changed into funny little signs, and much more problems. So the
> search for an alternative began.
>
>  For about one week we are now testing mercury and are quite
> satisfied with it. The programm runs absolutely stable and offers a
> lot of features. But there are some questions left, that I didn't
> found answered in the help.
>
> First, a short overview of the configuration there. There are 21
> local users, that use about 40 different eMail-Adresses. We are
> connected to the Internet via DSL (6 MBit) and receive the mails via
> pop3 from the provider. As I said before, the local Clients are
> using the Server via IMAP. The Mail Client is Mozilla Thunderbird
> for all Users.

Are you getting the mail from a "domain" mailbox?  If so, does your provider add the original SMTP RCPT To: address as a header in the message?

>
> And here are my open questions:
>
> -   How is it possible to assign one eMail-Adress to different users?
>     First I tried to fill in the local users in the Pop3-Client
>     Configuration for this Account, divided by a ",", but it did't
>     work. Secondly, I tried to establish a global filter rule, triggered
>     by the "to" field in the header, selected "copy to another user" as
>     action, also filled in the local users in the parameter field,
>     divided by a ",", but it didn' work either. So I had to create one
>     single filtering rule for every user, that shall get a copy of this
>     mails. Is there a special syntax to divide local user names? Or is
>     there any other, probably easier way to make different local users
>     receive the same mail, send to a specific adress?

I generally create a mailing list to do this.  For example, mail to an address like support@domain.com is going to the mailing list support where all the people assigned to supprovide support are member of the list.  In this way they all get the mail.

You can also create a FORWARD file in a users mail directory.  In this case you would create a user called support and then create a forward files in this users account that has all of the members of the support team.  In this case you must ensure that you turn on the file based forwarding in Configuration | Mercury core | Advanced.


 
>
> -   Strange behavior when creating folders in thunderbird: Creating
>     folders that contain messages is no problem. But every time a
>     folder is created, that should contain other folders, the folder is
>     not shown immediatly. Thunderbird has to be restarted to show the
>     new folder. Is there any solution for this problem? By the way, this
>     is the only point the users are really unsatisfied with: That a
>     folder only can contain mails OR subfolders. Some of the users have
>     20,000 Mails ore more in their clients, well structured in folders
>     and subfolders, but nearly every user had mails AND subfolders in
>     his root folders and in the inbox. So we had to change the folder
>     structure in every client when migrating to mercury. No Fun to do
>     this, really. It costs hours and hours...

Not sure what to tell you here.  I'm testing with Thunderbird v3.0 a1 and it works for me.  Folders that contain both mail and other folders is an IMAP4 option that it not implemented in Mercury/32 based on the file system it's using.


>
> -   Renaming Folders in Thunderbird is not possible. Every time we try
>     this, we get the error message "No such folder".  After a few
>     restarts of Thunderbird, the renamed folders appear as new folders,
>     beside the old folder name.

This is a Thunderbird problem.  I've no solution for you on this one.  I can rename the folders in OE, Outlook, Eudora and WinPMail with no problems.  

>
> -   Also deleting folders in Thunderbird is not always sucessful.
>     Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I could not find any reason,
>     whether it sometimes works and sometimes not.

Again, this is a Thunderbird problem.  Not sure why it's not working correctly but if there are more than one user connected to an account then the deletions and purges are not allowed.  My try limiting Thunderbird to one connection cached in the advanced server setup.

>
>  All the described "folder problems" in Thunderbird do only occur
> with mercury, it seems. I tried all those things with Thunderbird
> and three other IMAP-Servers, and everything worked fine.

Thunderbird might be assuming that all IMAP4 have the same capability, they do not.  Mercury IMAP4 has not implemented multiple connection delete/purge and folders that contain both folders and mail.  There may be other options that are not implemented as well.  Mercury/32 has implemented the University of Washington type IMAP4.

>
> Last question: The old Mail-Server had one very handy feature,
> called "smtp-forwarding". It allows to sent mails for a local user
> directly to another Mailserver, using a specific user name and
> password of this server. This was sometimes very helpfull, when the
> server of the provider was unavailable for some reasons and error
> messages send to the admin reached the receiver anyway, because
> these mails weren't send through the providers' server, but directly
> to my own mailserver. Is it possible to establish this functionalty
> in mercury somehow?

Not sure what this one is.  The forwarding is available but forwarding where the server connects to another specified server is not.

>
> Many questions, I know, perhaps lots of them will cause a silent
> laughter at the specialists in this forum. But, as the Subject says,
> Mercury is a new Software-Package to me and in the moment I am very
> glad, that it simply WORKS! After 4 weeks of further testing, the
> company owner wants to decide if Mercury shall be bought. When at
> least a few of the problems can be solved within this time, then I
> think, the chances are quite good.
>
>  Thanks for the help of everyone in prior,
> with greetings from Germany,
>
> Michael.

Hello Robert,

thank you for yours answers. The mailing-list finaly was the solution for my first problem! The second option, the FORWARD-File, as I understand it, would forward EVERY eMail-Adress of a user to its targets, but I wanted only to send multiple copies of ONE single eMail-Adress to a group of users. So your first hint was my choice.

By the way, we don't get the mails out of a "domain"-mailbox from the provider. Every eMail-Adress has its own Username and Password, so we really have about 40 Mailboxes at the provider.

Restricting Thunderbird to only one connection to Mercury unfortunately makes no difference to the several "folder-problems". It's a pitty, because these are the problems that concerns the users directly. I will try to contact the mozilla support and look in Thunderbird-Forums, If anyone has the same problems. If I find a solution, I will inform you.

And believe me, the "SMTP-Forwarding"-Feature is a very useful one. As I said in another post before, this is perhaps something for the wishlist for future Mercury-Releases...

 
That's all for the Moment, have a nice day,

Michael.
 

Sorry for naming you "Robert", Thomas!

Every Time I see your name, it reminds me of "Robert Stephenson", the famous british engineer and locomotive designer.
No offense meant!

Greetings from Germany,
Michael.
 

Ok, I had some time for further testing on the "folder problems" between Mercury and Thunderbird, and now I can explain a few things more precise. All the problems ONLY affect folders that contain subfolders. Folders, that contain messages, can be created, renamed and deleted without any problem. I just didn't realize this at the first time.

CREATING folders for subfolders: Folder isn't shown immediately, you have to restart Thunderbird OR simply close and reopen the folder tree.

RENAMING folders for subfolders: Error message "No such folder", until you uncheck "Show only subscribed folders" in Thunderbird's advanced IMAP Server-Settings. After unchecking this, also Folders for subfolders can be renamend at the first view, but after refreshing or restart the old name ist shown again. This happens NOT, when the folder already contains subfolders. Then the renaming seems also work correct at the first view, but after refresh or restart, there is a new folder with the new name, besides the old folder's name.

DELETING folders for subfolders: At the first view they are deleted, but after refresh or restart, they reappear. If the folder contained subfolders, that contained only messages, they are deleted, but the parent folder still exists. So the conclusion to me is: folders containing subfolders can't be deleted in Thunderbird with mercury as IMAP-Server.

My "workaround" for the users in the moment is: I delete folders, that contained subfolders, for them, from an installation of Pegasus on the mail-server. This works quick and reliable.

Perhaps some of the information can be helpful to the developers or the test-team.

Greetings from Germany,

Michael.
 

Since this folder rename problem does not happen in OE, Outlook 2002, Eudora 7.1 or WinPmail I suspect that the best place to send this problem is to the Thunderbird test-team.

I already did so. But they can say, that the problem does not occur

with thunderbird and other IMAP-Servers, which is definitely true. I

tested it also.

forum, that David already knows the reason for this problem and that it

will be probably solverd in the upcoming Version 4.6. Seems to be a"grey area" of RFC3501, as he wrote. I am not absolutely sure, if this is the same problem, but to me it seems so: http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/5929.aspx

Since I'm actually using v4.61 B2 I'm not all that sure I do not already have this change implemented.  That said, if all of the other IMAP4 clients do not have this problem and Thunderbird does I would first of all suspect that Thunderbird is not following the rules to determine what functions are actually implemented in the IMAP4 server and just assuming all work the same way.  I'm using the latest daliy release of Thunderbird and it still has problem with IMAP4.  That said, I can believe that they are having problems, I've never seen a more arcane  standard in my life.  Even to UW and Cyrus  developers are in each other face all the time about how it's suppoed to work.

I'm not sure what David needs to change to fix Thunderbird  and I always really worry about a fix to support one email client breaking another one. 

Did you tell the people at Thunderbird that this was only a problem with Thunderbird  and not OE, Outlook Eudora 7.1 and WinPMail?  Also, did you test against other UW IMAP4 servers?

Yes, I told them that other Clients don't have this problem. If the three other IMAP-Servers, which I tested with Thunderbird, are UW or Cyrus, I can't say, sorry. 

I send the mail to the T-Bird support this morning, I don't have an answer yet. But the problem is known there. I read it in their forums, the "MozillaZine" and the "BugZilla" as well.

I agree to you, that it can't be David's duty to fix any mail client's deficiencies. But, as David himself said in a post at the "MozillaZine" :"Thunderbird is clearly the #2 mail program (by numbers of users), and

we are, as a result, concerned that Mercury/32 should interoperate well

with it." I think both sides (Mercury and Thunderbird) would benefit from a solution.

Again, I do not disagree that both sides should be involved but until the people at Thunderbird acknowledge there is a problem and come to David asking for help them find a solution then I'm not all that sure what David can do to fix their problem.  When all other mail clients do not have the problem and one does then usually you would expect the developers of that mail client to determine what they are doing differently. Looking at the IMAP4 data going back and forth does not always tell the story.  It's not obvious to me at least what Thunderbird is doing differently with the data as received.  If they would simply say that we find that Mercury/32 does not properly respond to our request to do X then it's a place to start.

[quote user="Bladeinger"]

Yes, I told them that other Clients don't have this problem. If the three other IMAP-Servers, which I tested with Thunderbird, are UW or Cyrus, I can't say, sorry. 

I send the mail to the T-Bird support this morning, I don't have an answer yet. But the problem is known there. I read it in their forums, the "MozillaZine" and the "BugZilla" as well.

I agree to you, that it can't be David's duty to fix any mail client's deficiencies. But, as David himself said in a post at the "MozillaZine" :"Thunderbird is clearly the #2 mail program (by numbers of users), and

we are, as a result, concerned that Mercury/32 should interoperate well

with it." I think both sides (Mercury and Thunderbird) would benefit from a solution.

[/quote]

I'm still working this one and so far I've not found any IMAP4 server where the Thunderbird folder rename is clean.  I've used GMail (not sure what type of server this is since it just says GMail IMAP) and Bayarea.net (Courier-IMAP)  In both cases Thunderbird did the same thing.  When I did a rename it created a new folder and left the old folder in place. The process looks quite simply in WinPMail, not sure how to do the same sort of debug in Thunderbird.  I really think that this is something that needs to be looked at further by the Thunderbird team.  FWIW, I tried checking out Bugzilla, found a number of folder rename problems but I can't tell what they are saying most of the time.

 --- Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:45:00 ---
Connect to 'mail.bayarea.net' port 143, timeout 30.
12:45:00.843 [*] Connection established to 209.128.82.1
12:45:00.859 >> 0242 * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE ACL ACL2=UNION STARTTLS] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2004 Double Precision, Inc.  See COPYING for distribution information.\0D\0A
12:45:00.859 << 0032 A1 LOGIN "username" "password"\0D\0A
12:45:00.937 >> 0017 A1 OK LOGIN Ok.\0D\0A
12:45:00.953 << 0058 A2 RENAME "INBOX.Test Folder Rename" "INBOX.Test Folder"\0D\0A
12:45:02.984 >> 0023 A2 OK Folder renamed.\0D\0A
12:45:02.984 << 0011 A3 LOGOUT\0D\0A
12:45:02.000 >> 0041 * BYE Courier-IMAP server shutting down\0D\0A
12:45:02.000 >> 0024 A3 OK LOGOUT completed\0D\0A
12:45:02.000 --- Connection closed normally at Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:45:02. ---\0A\0A

Hello Thomas,

just to keep you informed: I have the first answer from the T-Bird-Team, but so far they only requested a few log files from me, that show the process of creating and renaming folders with the option "Show only subscribed folders" ON and OFF. 

The next days I will try to find out, what kind of servers the three are, in which I encountered no problems with the folder-handling of T-Bird.

[quote user="Bladeinger"]

Hello Thomas,

just to keep you informed: I have the first answer from the T-Bird-Team, but so far they only requested a few log files from me, that show the process of creating and renaming folders with the option "Show only subscribed folders" ON and OFF. 

The next days I will try to find out, what kind of servers the three are, in which I encountered no problems with the folder-handling of T-Bird.

[/quote]

How about getting a Fastmail or GMail account and go in with IMAP4 using Thunderbird and see what happens when you create and then try to rename a folder.  The Thunderbird developers may then be able to more easily duplicate the problem.  FWIW, I'm not so sure this is so much of a IMAP4 rename problem as it is a Thunderbird display problem.

There is coming some light in dark: The logs show, that thisT-Bird can't interpret or is missinterpreting the "/" that is created after the name of folders containing subfolders.

How do you get a "/" after the name?

As I understood, Mercury is creating them, as it is written in RFC 3501, Chapter 6.6, "CREATE command".