Big mailboxes EAS/IMAP how do you do it?

Question asked by Kenneth Knudsen - 3/4/2016 at 11:38 AM

Unanswered

I will share my latest experience with a customer with some 725 GB of mailboxes on 58 users. Some users having more than 70,000 mails in their inbox.

Our challenge:

Users having mailboxes bigger than 5 GB we basically gave up on EAS, as it never got done synchronizing (the customer have a 100/100 connection), so we switched users with issues on EAS to IMAP, but then another problem is showing its ugly face, the calendar and contacts are not synchronized and we have to map a sharepoint list to those. But we are still missing notes and tasks. And users on IMAP experience up to 5-6 minutes delay on receiving their emails, and they notice because their phones have had the mail for that time before it arrives at their desktop pc.

Even though we have mapped the calendar with Sharepoint it do not work when a user receives a meeting request, as upon accept the appointment is not added to the SmarterMail/sharepoint calendar but the default calendar so no sync to mobile devices for this user. I have to say I got a link from ST to a CalDAV add-in to outlook and it looks promising so far.

But what about Tasks and notes have anyone cracked that one?

We would prefer to be able to use EAS, and if MS can get it to work with +50GB mailboxes why are ST not able to make updates to their system so we can get it to work...

We also have issues with calendar appointments being pushed forward 1 month on recurring events after we migrated from Exchange. Reminders are completely lost. We have at least one confirmed errior with an appointment being pushed forward 1 day, so the customer almost missed a meeting with clients from Singapore.

Any information if anybody has cracked the issues above would be highly appreciated. We would like to stay with our SM. It works beautifully as long as mailbox sizes are under 5 GB, but big companies sometimes have serious big mailboxes, so we need solution for those.

I hope issues like this would be resolved in the upcoming SM15, so we dont have to wait for SM16 to get bigger mailboxes to run with EAS. We would love to see more Enterprise features implemented before the competition (MS) have captured all those customers.

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Paul Blank Replied

3/7/2016 at 12:34 PM

I use EAS on SM with my smartphone - Touchdown on Android. As such, Touchdown only synchronizes the last two weeks' email (I have it set to that - this is clearly well under 5GB of data), and that works really well.

For the desktop client, I use SM webmail, and of course it doesn't require EAS.

So I'm interested to see what ST says about this issue. BTW I happily have the "luxury" of forbidding the use of Outlook for my clients (thus far!), but things could certainly change. FYI for their desktops, I encourage users to stick with SM webmail, and some use Thunderbird (for email only).

Paul Blank Replied

3/7/2016 at 12:40 PM

One more note:

I find it useful to move users' previous years' emails into separate mailboxes, either parallel to Inbox or as subfolders. I divide them into one or two-year mailboxes, depending upon mailbox size. Takes awhile to do (SM should perhaps have a function that can be set to do this automatically) but it's worth it. In SM there's that "search everything" magnifying glass icon in lower left; that works well enough - see other posts for glitches in this search function.

Ionel Aurelian Rau Replied

4/19/2016 at 4:49 AM

We`re exactly in the same situation - we have users with 10+ GB mailboxes and they cannot sync properly with Outlook 2016 (how can we propose using the WebMail when they bought Outlook 2016 licenses?). Using ActiveSync will not work for emails and using IMAP will work fine for emails, but not for tasks, calendar, etc..

Our make-shift solution is: add in the user`s Outlook the same account twice: 1st with using ActiveSync, but only syncing back 1 month worth of emails, then another one using IMAP. This way the users with large mailboxes can continue using Outlook, but it`s a major hassle educating them why and when to use one or the other version of the same account in their Outlook. If you work in the IMAP account in Outlook, you can work normally with emails, but need to remember to always send meeting requests from the ActiveSync account. Also, in order to create a task from an email, you need to drag&drop the email on the tasks icon at the bottom left side of Outlook.

SmarterMail desperately needs to implement MAPI over HTTPS, even if paid. I believe that all focus of SM`s developers should be solely on this until a satisfactory implementation has been achieved - afterwards bother with any other new features.

Derek Curtis Replied

4/19/2016 at 3:42 PM

Employee Post

Tim posted a pretty lengthy reply here, and in it addresses how we're getting EAS and EWS issues resolved and how we're committing resources to it:

http://portal.smartertools.com/community/a87593/lost-an-enterprise-customer-due-to-errors-and-missing-features.aspx

Understand that there are millions of users without issues, and few mailboxes that are still seeing problems. Rest assured we're looking into it.

Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Kenneth Knudsen Replied

4/19/2016 at 4:30 PM

well we have only had problems, and that is always when the mailbox is a bigger one. I even had different number of emails in the inbox on the different protocols. EAS did not download all of the emails, but IMAP did.... EWS havent been working for a while, so lets see if it indeed is working, as it is a paid feature it should work flawlessly or you should make the feature free...

Think there are more important things to resolve over design issues and new editions as I feel issues are not being addressed over design and new features. Why add features when already existing features are not working 100%.

Also when you test in a lab you have all of the power and speed available to the client as there is not another 100 users pounding on the server, so any real life scenario you would have a hard time replicating.

Derek Curtis Replied

4/19/2016 at 5:13 PM

Employee Post

Hi, Kenneth. Just in case others don't see that other post I mentioned, in it Tim mentioned a couple of things that address your last 2 points:

"5).....However, while we can replicate browser and OS combinations, we can’t replicate user environments. Our internal tests using the same version of Windows and the same desktop clients can match yours — or your users’ — but we can’t replicate their combination of hardware, not to mention any third party products, antivirus, proxy solutions, etc. that are run.We test as much as we can as often as we can, make no mistake. However, there will always be issues/problems/situations we can’t replicate, much less anticipate. The same is true for any IT department within a company."

and

"6).......What we have done is pulled a significant number of resources from the re-design and moved them over to SmarterMail to ensure we have current versions of SmarterMail as solid as possible. Expect minor releases over the next few weeks to address most of the concerns."

So we're aware of the issues and the limitations of our testing. While we may never be able to solve the testing scenarios, we're aware of the syncing issues and putting resources towards fixing them.

Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Tim Uzzanti Replied

4/19/2016 at 5:29 PM

Employee Post

Kenneth,

The load has nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with the hundreds of different devices/clients that are constantly changing. We are constantly adjusting our code for new devices etc.. and re-test to see if that change impacted other clients. Even minor releases from some companies make significant changes.

A perfect example was that we put in a workaround for a bug in iOS for Calendars in EAS. When Apple got around to fixing it in iOS, their fix broke our workaround. Microsoft Outlook 2016 and EWS (other clients work fine) has been a real issue because Microsoft changed things significantly. They changed protocol versions and then realized how badly they implemented it and then have had a number of updates since. It has been a moving target.

These aren't complaints BTW... This is just the reality we live in. We know what we got ourselves into and we actually enjoy breaking down the protocols and hacking each of the clients to figure out how to fix these things!

Just last month, Microsoft released an update that broke POP3 which was deleting peoples mail off servers (all mail servers). Its has been chaotic at Microsoft but now looks like things are slowing down. The most frequent changes we see currently are in the Microsoft Mail client provided with Windows 10.

Yes, we are HEAVILY prioritizing our web interface. An important stat and why it is getting prioritized is that 9 million out of the 15 million log into webmail each day.

We have millions of people using EAS and EWS without issues.

But, we do have a couple dozen tickets that look similar and we are allocating even more resources so we can eliminate issues. The EWS for Microsoft Outlook 2016 hasn't been paused. That has had constant development.

The people who seem to have an issue... continue to have issues so we need to see what is in common. It may be how a server connects to your server and is changing a message or a specific client is making calendar items with an improper format etc. So, if you don't have a ticket... please open one so that we can get it fixed. The resources are now available to look into these.
Tim

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

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