Smartermail 14 imap changes

Question asked by dean brown - 11/18/2015 at 7:05 AM

Unanswered

This morning's email is lacking a few details:

"This change can impact the mail services for email accounts using older versions of Microsoft Outlook."

So Outlook 2003 through 2013? What about Thunderbird? Or other email clients?

"To lessen the potential impact to each email account, the most recent minor release of SmarterMail segments the UID change so that the re-sync of messages runs on only 10 email accounts per hour"

How's does affect the older Outlook versions (or other email clients)? Is it only Outlook 2016?

"To lessen the potential impact to each email account, the most recent minor release of SmarterMail segments the UID change so that the re-sync of messages runs on only 10 email accounts per hour."

What affect will this have on users? Will their mail between various devices be out of sync (between the email client, smartphone, web interface)?

"NOTE: Be careful when increasing the default value as increasing the number of accounts per hour can impact resource utilization while those accounts are processing."

How do we decide how much to change this to? I have some servers with only 20 accounts, others with 500.

"To solve that issue, Outlook users can delete and then recreate their Outlook profiles"

This will be a support nightmare!!

22 Replies

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Jim Vaden Replied

11/18/2015 at 7:38 AM

StupidMail at its best! How stupid!

Paul Blank Replied

11/18/2015 at 8:42 AM

To repeat Dean's question:

So Outlook 2003 through 2013? What about Thunderbird? Or other email clients?

W. T. Leaver Replied

11/18/2015 at 9:15 AM

Definitely a very confusing email. The subject is "SmarterMail 14.x - What You Need To Know". Which version are they talking about? I assume it must be the latest, 14.4?

Jim Vaden Replied

11/18/2015 at 10:33 AM

Exactly!

Derek Curtis Replied

11/19/2015 at 4:33 PM

Employee Post

Hey, All,

I wanted to address a few of the outstanding questions that people have…

First off, the changes for Outlook 2016 were in the 14.4 minor. However, we addressed everyone and used 14.x as the indicator as customers will eventually upgrade to a version of SmarterMail that has the Outlook 2016 changes.

Regarding the Outlook versions questions: We have only seen reports of some users running Outlook 2013 or earlier having the duplicate folder issue that requires recreating the users Outlook profile. We have no reports of other IMAP clients such as Thunderbird or eM Client having issues after they have re-synced.

Only IMAP clients are affected by this change. Clients syncing using POP, Exchange ActiveSync, Exchange Web Services or any other protocol are unaffected, as well as webmail.

Regarding the syncing of 10 email accounts per hour: Each server will be different as we don't know how many users use IMAP clients, how many IMAP clients each user has syncing their mailbox, how large those accounts are, what type of server they are running on, what other software is running on that server, etc. We set the update to occur on 10 accounts per hour to err on the side of not affecting server performance too much even for lower end servers. If you see the server is struggling at this rate you can reduce the number of updates per hour all the way down to one. If you are not seeing any impact to your server you can increase this value as high as you like.

I hope this clears things up some..

Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Jorge Alegre Replied

11/20/2015 at 11:54 AM

We have thousands of users using IMAP + Outlook (2010/2013/2016)....

To lessen the impact to our customers and to our helpdesk:

1 - Can we set <maxUidVvFixesPerHour>0</maxUidVvFixesPerHour> to "Bypass" this UIDVV update for now? (and apply all the other hotfixes and features included in the lastest updates!?)

2 - Do you have any option to control which accounts we want to "upgrade"?

Matt Petty Replied

11/20/2015 at 12:21 PM

Employee Post

Hi Jorge,

You can reduce the upgrade down to 1, but not 0. You can set it to 0 but that will just set the number internally to 1. It just goes alphabetically, there isn't a way to manually set the order or only upgrade specific accounts.

Matt Petty Senior Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

sam Replied

11/22/2015 at 6:52 PM

This is all so unclear it is stopping me from patching. You seriously need to give more information on this issue.

What happens to existing mailboxes before they are fixed? Will they still run OK on everything except the new Outlook 2016? Will they be broken on any IMAP client until they are fixed?

We have large Enterprise servers with like 5,000 IMAP users.
A basic calculation tells me that will take over 20 days to complete........

Please give more information on this. Thank you.

Hemen Shah Replied

11/23/2015 at 5:13 AM

What if some users are still on 2003 or 2007 outlook !!!

There is only one option to delete and recreate the profile ??

Requesting SM team for more details in depth, till then not able to apply this patch.

Jorge Alegre Replied

11/23/2015 at 5:53 AM

I must confess I was expecting another type of answer form ST Team..

Its not possible to ST to provide this kind of feature? Will be really helpfull...
Imagine our scenario...
As i've said, we have +3.000 users connected via IMAP + Outlook.
We dont really know how many of them will have to recreate their accounts... Maybe almost all, because they have a huge folder structure.
If we apply your update... your rotine will start running in alphabetic mode, without any other control. Users from the same domain will detect problems in different days (we have domains with a lot of accounts, and with 5GB mailbox size).
Some of them dont know how to recreate an profile, even using an Step-by-step.... and even those who know how to do it, will be afraid that they will lose their appointments, notes, tasks, etc, so they will request support, like they usually do...

Recreate an profile is not easy as you say and take time.
- Create an Backup (E-mail/contacts/Calendars/Tasks/notes/etc)
- Recreate Profile
- Reconfigure IMAP
- Reconfigure Calendar / Contacts / Tasks (Import)
- Reconfigure Etc
- Do some tests, to make sure that everything is ok...

We really need to have more control about this update!

Please think about this...

1 - Accept the value 0, to bypass it, so we could update right now, and fix all the other issues included in your latests updates.
2 - Possibility to configure an extra node in the user XML, to bypass it or execute it. (right now only outlook 2016 users need this update ASAP)

sam Replied

11/23/2015 at 5:31 PM

If its true that all user of any outlook below 2016 will have to resynch the whole mailbox, then surely it makes more sense to have an option in webmail for users to manually run the update themselves. Then we can simply tell all users that if they are running Outlook 2016, they need to login to webmail and click an "Upgrade for MS Outlook 2016" button?

Then queue the update processes server side just like migrations etc are queued to prevent server overload.

Derek Curtis Replied

11/23/2015 at 9:30 PM

Employee Post

Hemen, the only reason you'd need to delete/recreate the profiles is if the user saw duplicate IMAP folders after the re-sync. You do not need to delete/recreate ALL Outlook profiles for all of your users.

Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Jorge Alegre Replied

11/24/2015 at 3:33 AM

I couldn't have said it better myself!

1 - Accept the value 0, to bypass the auto-mode and use only the "manual-mode", (so we could update smartermail ASAP and fix all the other issues included in your latests updates.)
2 - Have an option in each mailbox to "Upgrade to Outlook 2016"

sam Replied

11/29/2015 at 7:14 PM

no response from smartermail devs?

Paul Blank Replied

11/29/2015 at 8:19 PM

2 - Have an option in each mailbox to "Upgrade to Outlook 2016" .. seems like a great idea.

Derek Curtis Replied

11/30/2015 at 3:40 PM

Employee Post

To clear up a bit of confusion...

Users will only have to delete/recreate their profiles if they see duplicate IMAP folders as a result of the upgrade. So, not every user will need to delete/recreate their profiles. As we mentioned, we haven't see a lot of this issue but wanted to provide a solution in case the problem is seen after the upgrade.

As for allowing users to run the re-sync themselves, it's a good idea. However, while that may work for some users, we have to create a solution that is the most efficient for ALL customers. Automatically running the sync but allowing administrators to manage and monitor the number of mailboxes that are synced at any given time was the most efficient solution across our user base.

As for having a large number of users, the number synced at any give time is a flexible value that can be adjusted based on your particular hardware. Some may have to run 1 at a time, but others can run 5, 10 or 50 or more at a time. Large folder structures, aged hardware, etc. are all things that had to be taken into consideration when we developed the sync process and all are additional reasons for why we made it as flexible as possible.

Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

JML Replied

12/24/2015 at 9:36 AM

Where is the setting to change from 10 to X?

ellisfr Replied

6/10/2016 at 1:04 AM

@Jorge Alegre What did you do at the end ? How went the migration if you did it ?

We still have 2 SmarterMail v11 that we are afraid to upgrade because of this resync thing...

Paul Blank Replied

6/10/2016 at 3:56 AM

Tell me about it. 11 has been quite stabile.

Matthew Hall Replied

10/10/2016 at 12:55 AM

Is there a way to view the progress of the updating imap folders. We are nor 3 days in, and don't know if we are nearly there or have a month left to sync all our imap accounts.

Matthew Hall System Administrator Farrell Heyworth

Employee Replied

10/10/2016 at 9:01 AM

Employee Post

Hi Matthew. If you open the following file:
C:\Program Files (x86)\SmarterTools\SmarterMail\Service\mailConfig.xml

Search for the following tag: <uidVvFixProgress>
If this XML tag contains an email address, then the IMAP UID re-sync is still taking place. Once the re-sync is complete for all users, this field will say None.

Matthew Hall Replied

10/11/2016 at 1:18 AM

Many thanks...

It actually says
<uidVvFixProgress>done</uidVvFixProgress>

So thanks for the help.

Matthew Hall System Administrator Farrell Heyworth

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