We have a web server via a hosting provider that also handles emails using
SmarterMail 2.6. People typically access their individual account by using
a browser page (Internet Explorer) to log into SmarteMail.

At work I used Outlook 2002 to set up several IMAP email accounts (one per
user) so that I could archive some of the really old emails. It works
pretty well, but I noticed a couple very strange and worrisome issues:

1) On one user's account, I noticed that folders for that account listed in
Outlook weren't all there. They showed up fine in the Webmail window
(accessing the account by logging in through the login page in Internet
Explorer), but didn't show up in the Outlook IMAP account folder list. I
thought this might be because of special characters used in the folder name,
but one folder with what I would think is a special character (an ampersand)
showed up fine, while another folder with a space didn't. For instance, the
folder "Mark & Tom" showed up in outlook (I assumed the ampersand would be
an issue, or maybe spaces, but they apparently were NOT problems), but the
folder "Rich Workload" did NOT show up in Outlook's IMAP account, even
though it's there in the Webmail account. So apparently spaces and
ampersands aren't an issue, but for some reason one folder simply did not
appear in the Outlook IMAP folder list for this account.

2) Some folders that successfully show up in the IMAP folder list in
Outlook show that there are no emails inside that folder, even though there
ARE emails there on the server. For instance, the folder "Mark & Tom" DID
show up in the Outlook IMAP folder list, but the emails contained within it
did not. Logging in via the Webmail page (using Internet Explorer to log
into the SmarterMail email account) showed that there are several emails in
the folder, but in the Outlook IMAP account, clicking the folder "Mark &
Tom" would return empty space in the right pane (which shows emails). This
is not due to any flagging status on the server, though (ie. "read" mail vs.
"Unread" mail), because "read" mail still showed up in other folders in the
Outlook IMAP folder list.

So what would cause either (or both) of these two issues? I tried deleting
the IMAP accounts and re-setting them up, but the EXACT same issue occurred
for both; folders not being listed in Outlook, or folders showing up but
reading as empty in Outlook.

Again, it didn't seem to be a consistent thing that I could troubleshoot;
spaces and/or special characters in the folder names were not a problem
("Mark & Tom" showed as folders, but "Rich Workload" did not), and the
"read" vs. "unread" status didn't seem to be a consistent issue either
("read" emails showed up in one folder but not another).

Can anyone help with this? Ideas, suggestions, advice? Anything would be
appreciated, and thanks for reading.

Complete Newb

CompleteNewb wrote:

At work I used Outlook 2002 to set up several IMAP email accounts
(one per user) so that I could archive some of the really old emails.
It works pretty well, but I noticed a couple very strange and
worrisome issues:

If this were happening to me, I'd examine both the server's connection logs
and Outlook's logs to see what is actually transpiring between the two.
--
Brian Tillman