Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solutions?

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netelligence
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu May 29, 2014 3:55 pm

Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solutions?

Post by netelligence »

I am liking everything about Mailenable except how it plays with Outlook.

I was very disappointed to find that the MAPI connector uses IMAP for email. IMAP sucks and there are many known problems with Outlook and IMAP. So my current problem with that configuration is that it takes a very long time to delete emails or move emails to different folders. Everything freezes up, Outlook shows "Not Responding" and then like 10+ seconds later the email gets deleted or moved and I can continue. Now I realize that this is more of a problem with Outlook than Mailenable, but why can't Mailenable create a real synchronization method using their own methods rather than relying on IMAP? Google's Outlook Sync uses their own methods for email, calendar and such and it works perfectly. So it is possible.

So, I decided to upgrade to Outlook 2013 from Outlook 2010 in hopes that IMAP was better.... not. However, I thought if I switched to ActiveSync that is now supported in Outlook 2013, that might solve the problem.... which it did. Outlook configured as ActiveSync was very responsive. HOWEVER, after a couple of days Outlook crashes immediately upon opening and the only way I have found to fix it is to delete the profile and start over. But that only gives me a couple of days of usage before Outlook starts crashing again. Now I don't know if that more of an Outlook problem (I did find other people having the same issue on the internet with Outlook.com service) or a Mailenable issue.

All I want is a mail client and server that works the way it should. Something that is fast and reliable. Anyone else have success with other desktop email client besides Outlook? With sync'd contact and calendar support? --- or any other solutions?

Mailenable, please create a MAPI connector that DOES NOT use IMAP. I don't know how Google is doing it, but it works with their own Sync/connector tool.

Thanks,
Netelligence

rfwilliams777
Posts: 1370
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 5:26 pm
Location: Kingsville, Texas

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solution

Post by rfwilliams777 »

I do not know how Google does it because I don't really care for their service. Additionally, Google may have caching servers and whatnot to help with load, speed, etc. in contrast to someone running a single mail server. Further true synchronization--in my opinion--is best left to Exchange-type. If ME could do an Exchange like communication as an option in Enterprise and Premium, it would make a lot of my clients extremely happy.
Robert Williams, Owner
www.WilliamsWebSolutions.com
#1 in MailEnable Business-Class Email Hosting - Switch to Williams Web Solutions and we will migrate your accounts to us for FREE!
We can be hired to help you with your Mail Enable server, too!

netelligence
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu May 29, 2014 3:55 pm

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solution

Post by netelligence »

I do not like Google services either... which is why I'm transitioning away. And to be clear, I'm talking about their sycronization plugin. It is an exe that is run on the desktop and it integrates their gmail into outlook. Only available to paying business customers. It syncs using a plugin in the background and syncs mail, contacts, calendar, tasks and so forth just like Exchange would do and just like ME tries to do. The difference is that the google plugin doesn't use Outlook IMAP to sync the mail. That is the problem with ME. If they could sync mail to Outlook without using the Outlook implementation of IMAP, then that would be a huge step for ME and would make ME stand out further from their competitors as a better Exchange replacement.

Outlook IMAP sucks and apparently Outlook 2013 Activesync isn't ready for primetime yet.

sagelike
Posts: 324
Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:58 am

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solution

Post by sagelike »

I had the same problem with oOutlook 2013 freezing using ME Activesync. Make sure you are running latest Outlook with all updates and at least 8.x versions of Mailenable. That seemed to help however I noticed that Outlook will occasionally crash on start and I discovered that certain emails seemed to cause the problem and the crashing would start after the last email received.

I was able to delete the the last email immediately after Outlook started crashing and that would solve the problem but you have to be fast.

I also found that syncing only 30 days prevented Outlook crashing. Whenever I tried to download ALL email from server, Outlook would eventually start crashing at some point.

I haven't tried going longer than 30 days lately and will try again soon.

netelligence
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu May 29, 2014 3:55 pm

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solution

Post by netelligence »

So after further testing I have found that the ME MAPI connector does NOT use Outlook's implementation of IMAP. Actually, if I configure Outlook 2013 as simply an IMAP client, it works perfectly. No delay in deleting. The status bar at the bottom lets you know it is connected or synchronizing. No annoying popup that says updating server. I mistakenly thought Outlook was doing all of those things, but turns out it is the ME MAPI connector.

I hate to complement Outlook, but I was wrong. After seeing the performance of Outlook without the MAPI connector, I'm very happy. Now if I could get the Calendar and Contacts to sync without the connector. Too bad Outlook doesn't support CardDav and CalDav.

ME could you please fix the MAPI Connector to handle email like it should? I've switched to using eM client. It is very good at IMAP, CalDev, and CardDev. However, my clients prefer Outlook, so I'd rather ME MAPI did what it is supposed to do with Outlook.

RNEUSCHUL
Posts: 92
Joined: Wed Jan 27, 2010 11:16 pm

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solution

Post by RNEUSCHUL »

What would be far better is that MailEnable should also support RPC/HTTP as well as IMAP & MAPI.

MS's documentation of their proprietary MAPI protocols is [and always has been] less than perfect: very very few mail server vendors have managed to release a viable MAPI implementation that works in a stable reliable safe manner: MailEnable are not alone in suffering this problem. However that's not really the point: if they are going to release a MAPI plugin at all then there's a certain degree of responsibility to ensure that it works as expected: the ME plugins since at least version 6 have not worked reliably or consistently well, particularly over internet connections

However even with IMAP there are still significant issues and problems when Mail Enable is deployed for internet users rather than as a purely local deployment: I can't speak definitively to version 8.51 implementation but versions up to 8.03 deployed in the cloud on W2008R2 with very good fast backbone connections and plenty of virtual cpu/ram and fast vdisks was still suffering lots of IMAP session drops, session timeouts and failures to login to IMAP services. ME claim the latest version reduces IMAP cpu/memory footprint and makes the service faster and more reliable but after 36 hours of live deployment we have not seen any significant signs of improvement for our end users.

togokle
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Nov 26, 2012 10:36 am

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solution

Post by togokle »

Hi all,
i have the same problem. Our customer is unhappy. When he start using MailEnalbe with MAPI connector he was happy but he grow very fast and now the mapi connector is not working as expected. We have a dedicated server with 560 mailboxes and 60GB of emails.

I had installed Mailenable 8.54 on a test server with only one mailbox with about 4600 email messages in the inbox, 1 GB of dimension, and outlook 2013 with mapi connector is very slow when i delete an email. About 15 sec or Outlook freeze with (not Responding) message.
In my test, the only way to improve performance is to use MailEnable on a physical machine. I tried to populate a mailbox with 4000 messages (about 1GB) on a MailEnable 7.53 and outlook with mapi work well. i can delete one email in 1 sec... The problem is that we don't have enough space to move that customer on the physical server...
I don't think that it is a problem of virtual architecture. I had installed ME on a virtual machine on vSphere 5.5 on a DELL PE R720xd 64GB RAM and 2 six core. The vmdk was on local disk...
May the problem be related to the kind of the SCSI controller used for the vm? LSI Logic Parallel or LSI Logic SAS or VMWare Paravirtual. I'm using LSI Logic SAS.

I hope Mailenable will resolve soon the problem...

sorry for the poor english
Thank you

rozza6
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Nov 21, 2014 4:29 pm

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solutions?

Post by rozza6 »

Hi Guys,

I know this is a fairly old thread but did anyone manage to resolve this issue? I have exactly the same symptoms with a newly installed server, I have moved the customer from O365 to ME and the customer is now really jumping up and down due to the time it's taking to delete emails.

Many Thanks

Paul

rfwilliams777
Posts: 1370
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 5:26 pm
Location: Kingsville, Texas

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solutions?

Post by rfwilliams777 »

How many accounts are you hosting? How muchg storage space? What are your server's specs? Is it IMAP only or IMAP & MAPI? What kind of Internet connection do you have going to the server and to their workstations? Do they have the option selected in their Outlook to draw a line on the email when deleting before it will actually delete it?
All of those questions are valid as any of those or a combination of those can affect performance/speed.
Robert Williams, Owner
www.WilliamsWebSolutions.com
#1 in MailEnable Business-Class Email Hosting - Switch to Williams Web Solutions and we will migrate your accounts to us for FREE!
We can be hired to help you with your Mail Enable server, too!

jaredrampartap
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Feb 05, 2015 3:38 pm

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solutions?

Post by jaredrampartap »

From what I've noticed with client emails in the company where I work, large mailboxes whether it be by size (5GB+) or amount of emails (10,000 - 15,000+), tend to be the worst. Emails take long to get to their outlook, the outlook freezes, crashes, etc. What we tried doing was rename the large inbox adding "old" to the end of it and creating another with the same email they had and let them start fresh again while still having access to their older mail. This has worked 100% so far for us. It's short term until a better solution can be found to handle large inboxes.

rfwilliams777
Posts: 1370
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 5:26 pm
Location: Kingsville, Texas

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solutions?

Post by rfwilliams777 »

I, too, have recommended that for a client who consumes 35+ GB of storage for their post office (one mailbox is 15 GB).
Robert Williams, Owner
www.WilliamsWebSolutions.com
#1 in MailEnable Business-Class Email Hosting - Switch to Williams Web Solutions and we will migrate your accounts to us for FREE!
We can be hired to help you with your Mail Enable server, too!

METom
Posts: 30
Joined: Wed Nov 28, 2012 6:13 pm

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solutions?

Post by METom »

For me it is the same.
Running ME Enterprise 8.60 and OutlookAdd-In v2.40.
Users with huge Mailboxes 5+GB will be able to work some time (after having synced them looong time to their local profile, will suddenly not able to use outlook any more.
Outlook will start and show the inbox in an (old) state, then sitting there for EVER not allowing any interaction with outlook - it just freezes!

Had to delete the profile and associated local data.
After resyncing (:= loooong time) it works for some time, then it happens again some day.
Going by WebMail will be OK with the account though. So it does not seem to be a server side problem!

Mitigating this causes me a LOT of time and workload every time it happens.

Hope there will be a more stable MapiPlugin in near future.

MartynK
Posts: 1376
Joined: Sat Dec 28, 2002 1:12 am
Location: Hong Kong

Re: Highly Frustrated with Outlook and Mailenable - Solutions?

Post by MartynK »

Have a look at http://www.arpdev.com/

I have been using this for a little while, a few teething issues, but its coming nicely and seems to work better with Outlook.

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