[Davmail-users] Seeking a solution to some DavMail problems

[Lintula <bug...@cs...>]

Having previously used the Cyrus IMAP server, we are now migrating
to Exchange and I have been experimenting to see if a shared DavMail
server for our organization could work for us. Exchange calendars are
considered important, and since the Exchange EWS Provider Add-on for
Lightning has been abandoned, I hope that DavMail shines in this area
in particular to allow Thunderbird users to continue using it.

We don't strictly need to use DavMail for IMAP unless it gives
advantages to Exchanges IMAP interface (not having to configure the
special folders by hand is one) at no significant costs. SMTP and
LDAP can be handled through other channels as well, but calendar
needs a solution and I'm hoping DavMail is it.

Unfortunately, I've had a number of problems and would welcome any insight.

With IMAP, it seems that shared mailboxes seem to be impossible
to handle well. Ideally I would like to configure only one DavMail
account into Thunderbird, log in once and be presented a nice treeview
structure of the folders that looked something like this:

 INBOX
 Drafts
 Sent
 Trash
 Junk
 myproject
 myownfolder
 users/
   joh...@co.../
     johnsproject
     course3
   jan...@co.../
     janesproject

Unfortunately I have not figured out how this could be done, and the
suggestions in the FAQ suggest to me that it is not possible, even
though they don't say it straight. Do I really need to create a new
account for each shared folder?

Changing the "IMAP server directory" to "/users/joh...@co..."
sort of works to access someone elses mail, but I wanted to read those
of jan...@co... too, not to even mention those of my own,
so this is a no-go unless I'm missing something obvious. This would
work poorly even if I was to abandon my initial goal of only logging
in once, as Thunderbird kind of shares my goal and doesn't allow me
to configure multiple accounts with the same hostname/username pair.
The second suggestion of using domain\user\joh...@co...
as username thus works better in that regard, but clearly requires
setting up another account in Thunderbird.

An option not mentioned in the FAQ is the Other Users namespace. If
I write "/users/joh...@co..." there and then fight with
Thunderbird for a while - I'm not sure exactly how, perhaps just
disable "show only subscribed folders" and a restart - I do get pretty
much what I wanted, but only as far as john.smith is concerned. What
then of jane.doe?

All of these options are error-prone if my contacts have enabled that
their inbox folder is visible but not readable to me. DavMail then
ends up querying it, getting a permission denied, and trying again.
Repeatedly, perhaps indefinitely. I expect any other folder that
is visible but not readable will do the same, but inbox may be more
problematic than others as it is the default.

A similar problem affects shared calendars. My contacts have generally
not given me "Reviewer" privileges to their calendars, only "Free/Busy
time, subject, location". This is enough to schedule a time for a
meeting and works as such with DavMail. However, if I try to add such
a calendar into Lightning, DavMail will just keep retrying a permission
denied, and Lightning too will just drop everything and wait for it.

The calendar view in Outlook and the webapp show the calendars with
events saying "Busy" when the contact isn't available. Would it be
possible for DavMail to provide a similar experience, or at least
give up gracefully upon denied permission?

Finally, the address book. It works fine most of the time, but I get
broken duplicates for people whom I have added in Lync. The e-mail
addresses displayed for these duplicates are something like:

/o=something/ou=Exchange Administrative Group
(FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=somethingelse

Contacts that I have added manually through Outlook don't suffer from
this, but they are those of people outside the organisation which
may be the distinction. Do you know what is going on, and is there
any way around it?

The software used are Exchange 2010 SP1, DavMail 4.5.1, Thunderbird
24.8.0 (RHEL6) and Lightning 2.6.5 (EPEL).