There was some discussion on the list in the past about problems with Outlook Express not interoperating well with Cyrus due to it corrupting the seen database by using multiple concurrent connections, confusing the caching model in Cyrus.
Our desktop support people are trying to stump up support for making Outlook Express on Windows be the preferred email client - which at the moment is more or less Eudora.
Does anyone have opinions about whether Outlook Express 6 still causes the seen database corruption with Cyrus 2.1.10 or later?
Also if anyone has any other bad (or good) experiences with Outlook Express as a client with Cyrus I'd like to hear about them.
I don't know of any discussion of database corruption, but the problem is that Outlook would be confused about the seen flags since it uses two different IMAP connections to process them and Cyrus keeps all that in memory per-process. The only "corruption" issue I have seen is that twice we had a user being unable to delete messages from a folder that was perfectly fine (and other IMAP clients could delete messages without a problem), and after deleting the subscription and resubscribing the problem went away. Research suggested this was a race condition in OE that had nothing to do with the IMAP server other than perhaps participation in the timing aspects of the race condition. It was not reproducable and has not happened in over 2 months. (This is with a user base of 2300 users, ~250 connected at any one time, and 90G spool space).
Most of our users use OE6, and there have been no issues I am aware of in the 3.5 months we have been running it since I applied my patch for flushing the in-memory seen flags state to disk whenever it changes and checking the seen flags on disk for updates before replying to the client. This is with 2.1.11 and 2.1.12, and if you need the patch I would be happy to send it to you. Note that this will increase I/O traffic so you may not want to apply the patch if you have little margin for I/O bandwidth. Our server is so lightly loaded (it was sized to handle the load when we were running UW-IMAP) we didn't see any noticable difference, but I know the traffic will be higher.
-- John A. Tamplin Unix System Administrator Emory University, School of Public Health +1 404/727-9931
