More e-mail tribulations

It's not often that the songs of '80s hair metal bands intersect with IT management, but our recent foray into setting up an open source IMAP server at InfoWorld to deliver mail to the executive team's Treos (see “Mobile Messaging With Open Source”) had me singing a couple of lines from an early '80s Motley Crue hit "She'll use her time up / Have nothing to show" (read on for the name of the song).

After we set up the server, we did in fact have something to show, but we encountered another unexpected problem that did leave us with no simple solution. The Cyrus IMAP server delivered e-mail to the Treos flawlessly, but new trouble began when Kevin McKean (our CEO) tried to check his new IMAP account using Outlook 2002. His client would successfully login but was unable to find any new messages. After digging through mailing lists and newsgroups, I made a startling discovery while I was still humming Motley Crue's "Too Fast for Love." Initially, it appeared that our chosen IMAP server was too fast for Outlook. In the end, I wasn't so sure. Once again, I had entered a maze of open standards issues while trying to accomplish something that seemed ridiculously simple on the surface: get e-mail with Outlook via IMAP.

In the beginning, I knew Kevin was going to want to use Outlook and I also knew that Outlook supported IMAP, so I wasn't particularly worried. The Cyrus server, a reference implementation of IMAP, provides a standard and very high-performance IMAP engine on the server side, and we had tested it with Mozilla and Mac OS's Mail with zero problems. When Kevin was able to get his mail via IMAP using any client but Outlook, I figured there was something different about Outlook, so I focused my sleuthing energies on the Cyrus IMAP/Outlook combination. I should have heeded the prior warnings in RFC (request for comments) 2683("IMAP4 Implementation Recommendations"): "NEVER assume that because your client works with one or two servers, or because your server does fine with one or two clients, you will interoperate well in general." Wise words.

I looked for available information from Microsoft and learned that Outlook supports IMAP4, but not IMAP4rev1, which has actually been a standard since 1996. (Oddly enough, Microsoft Exchange has supported IMAP4rev1 at least since Version 5.5available since 1999). Digging deeper into the Cyrus mailing lists, I found recent postsfrom mail administrators who claimed that Outlook couldn't handle Cyrus IMAP's speed -- hence the "too fast for Outlook" theory. I couldn't find any other information that would explain my problem, so I latched onto that explanation as the likely cause of our problems. If my fast, standards-based, open source IMAP server didn't work with Outlook because it was too fast, Microsoft was going to hear about it in this week's column.

The only problem with my theory is that, just before my deadline approached, I decided to test Outlook myself with our IMAP server. It worked absolutely flawlessly. I asked Kevin Railsback, our IT manager, to run the same test. Flawless. Kevin McKean's Outlook still isn't working, and we can't for the life of us figure out why. The next step is setting up a protocol sniffer to see what's really going on at the lowest level, even though everyone knows that pulling out the protocol sniffer is the IT equivalent of the 99-yard Hail Mary pass with no time on the clock. Hopefully, we'll use our time up and have something to show.