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Build 7565 - Can't delete messages on Mac Mail (IMAP)
Problem reported by Sébastien Riccio - 9/22/2020 at 4:16 AM
Resolved
Hello,

Since latest update which contains this modification:

Added: Server-side language support for all protocols. (Only Thunderbird and Outlook for Windows will show translated folder names using IMAP; "Inbox" is not translated.)

Our customers on OSX that have their webmail language set to French can't delete mails from their mail client (Mail on OSX with IMAP).

I was able to reproducte the issue by configuring an account  onMac Mail.
- First with the webmail set to english. In this case I can delete a message from Mac Mail.
- Then when I switch the webmail to french and restart Mac Mail, it can't delete mails any more.


It's strange because in the settings it seems to show that it detected the correct folder after the language change.


Note:
It's the same problem if I try to move a mail from the inbox to junk mail, or to sent items.

Note bis:
It's seems it's specific to french. Changing the mailbox to Deutsch (german) for example, does not produce this issue.

Note 3rd:
It's the same with emClient. An account configured with IMAP with the webmail language set to french, no other special folder othen than inbox can be accessed.

Note 4:
Also with french, german, the Draft folder is not detected anymore and disappear.

As conclusion I would say that the french folders translation with IMAP is completly broken, and on a more global scale the Draft folder is broken (at least for french, german).

Please is it possible to stop breaking something every update ? This is supposed to be production ready releases, not a constant beta branch,..



Sébastien Riccio
System & Network Admin

7 Replies

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2
Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Yea, we have a task on that which should be resolved in our next release.
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
0
Sébastien Riccio Replied
Hello Tim,

If you have an hotfix available for this issue, don't hesitate to send me a custom build.
You know 90% of our customers are french speaking so it's kinda a major issue for us.

For some of them we switched their language back to english in the webmail to workaround the issue. But we can't do it for everyone or it will then be a wave of support ticket that their webmail went back to english...

Thanks
Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com
2
Sébastien Riccio Replied
Hello,

I've tested the build 7571 on our test environment. It improved the results with emClient that can now use the folders, but on Mac Mail, Thunderbird it's still unusable.

On a more global thought. Is translating the special folders name for IMAP a way to go. As far as I know with IMAP the special folders have tags \Sent \Junk \etc.... that are used by the client to identify the special folders and then it's the client that displays the recognized folders in the language selected in the client.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to have with IMAP the folder names change according to the language selected in the webmail.

How other mail servers handle this ? For example as far as I know dovecot always use english folder names for the special folders, but in the mail clients or webmail (for example roundcube) it's translated client side.

For example/proof:


Here is an account I have on a dovecot based mail server. The folders on the server are english. I switched the client language to french and they are displayed in french.

No server-side translation involved.

Seems to me that translating these folders server-side for IMAP leads only to trouble without any benefit, or I am missing something ?  Please re-think this change...


Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com
0
Andrew Barker Replied
Employee Post
Sébastien,

You are correct that IMAP has tags for special folders like Sent Items and Deleted Items and that many clients recognize those tags and use their own folder names instead of the names provided by the server. We have noticed, however, that some clients, such as Thunderbird, use most of the folder names that the server send over. The one exception to this is the Inbox. The IMAP specification requires that the Inbox always be identified as "INBOX", so clients will always display it based on their configured language.

I hope this helps to clear up why we are translating the folder names for IMAP.
Andrew Barker Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
1
Sébastien Riccio Replied
Hello Andrew,

Thank your for this clarification. Then we hope that you'll find a solution to keep the translated folder names in a way that it doesn't break most of the mail clients when using IMAP.

Actually we had to decide to rollback to 7544 despide the need for other fixes in recent build, after having hundred of customer having trouble with their clients.

Kind regards.
Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com
0
Sébastien Riccio Replied
Hello,

I tested the latest build against the IMAP special folders issues. Everything seems to be fixed (tried a user set to french with emClient, thunderbird, Mac mail). This is a good thing.

However, with outlook and imap it's another story.

If the user is set to french, Outlook creates duplicate folders and use these instead of the existing "system" ones.

This is something I've reported in a ticket we have open about the imap folder translation issues (03B-26FCA001-0B67), yesterday morning, after trying custom build 7572.

I can't reproduce the issue with build 7544, so probably linked to the translation thing.


EDIT: If I delete these folders and restart outlook, they are recreated.

EDIT2: I did some language change (german, portuguese, french) in the webmail and restarted outlook each time. So now I have a mix of folders created by outlook in different languages. 
Funny thing though and probably the origin of the issue, only the folders that contains accents are duplcated. Smell like an encoding mismatch somewhere ?

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com
1
Sébastien Riccio Replied
Hello,

Can we have please in the next build, a global server setting where we can enable/disable the special folders translation for IMAP.
Since this was introduced it brought only trouble for our customers and therefore for us.
We don't see any benefit for this feature and it compilcates an already complicated enough service.

Also if customers, after having their client configured are sometimes changing the language in the webmail because they use a computer that has a different default language and by mistake change their webmail language it can mess the configuration of some clients that doesn't automatically re-assign special folders.

I really think that as system admin we should have the choice to enable or disable the translated folders for IMAP so if we want to play it safe can still disable this feature and the others feeling adventurous can enable it.

In our case we need a STABLE service. The benefit from this feature is really not worth the trouble. Even this was almost fixed in new builds there is still issues with some clients (outlook) and probably others that we don't know yet.

Still we're convinced that it's the _mail client_ to translate the name of the folders according to the language set in _the client_, not in the webmail.

Also staying with standard english folder names for these special folders, through IMAP, will avoid issues with folder name encoding and mismatches that brings trouble.

Thank you for your consideration.

Kind regards

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

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