CardDAV Issues with MacOS

[mikebonte]

Hi Ian and everyone else,

Hope you all are staying safe during this outbreak.

We are having some really bad trouble with the MailEnable CardDAV implementation and our MacOS clients as of late. We are seeing this behavior from both Catalina and Mojave. MailEnable Pro 10.29. Using the native Address Book application.

CardDAV syncing had been working fine until sometime either the end of 2019 or early parts of 2020. What happens can vary from case to case, but a typical issue is a user attempts to modify an existing contact. The modification posts to the server but then all the contacts disappear from that user's address book and never reappear. Deleting the account and purging the Address Book config files from ~\Application Support are necessary to get back the address book.

We also see at times where a user modifies a contact, and when that posts to the server every contact gets deleted from the account with the exception of the edited contact. ME Webmail confirms this (as well as looking at the postoffice directory).

To flush out existing contact issues, I set up a new account this morning and started up a clean MacOS address book. Added the account and attempted to add a contact. The contact added, posted to the server, and then my address book was empty. The contact showed up in ME webmail and I never saw it again on the MacOS address book.

Oddly, everything seems to be working OK with IOS clients at the moment. I was originally suspicious of MacOS Catalina, but we are seeing the problem on Mojave as well and as of the same timeframe.

We are temporarily abandoning CardDAV on MailEnable for some users and moving them to iCloud, and we are seeing some odd things. I am pulling Mailenable's .VCF files and importing them to address book.... we are seeing some cards that appear to have UTF8 encoding issues (they display fine in ME web interface) and we are also having trouble with contacts that have pictures in them when I import. If I edit the photo data out of the .VCF then it all appears OK.

I suspect there may be a variety of things at play here. There have been some challenges with this setup over the years but never anything as serious as what is happening now.

Just floating this out for a little guidance and to see what the braintrust thinks.

Thank you,
Mike Bonte

[MailEnable-Ian]

Hi Mike,

We have tried emulating the issues you have described on a test mac running mac OS Catalina without success. The best way forward would be to lodge a support ticket and provide example copies of the .VCF files that become corrupt after you edit them along with copies of the "Contacts " folders for the mailboxes reporting the missing items after editing a contact. This will allow us to copy the data to a test mailbox on our end and try to emulate the behavior.