Some thoughts and bugs for consideration in the future

[Docent]

Hello,

I've recently begun to switch me and my users to MailEnable Enteprise and MAPI connector instead of POP3 access. So far I've gathered some thoughs and bugs - if there is a chance you could take them under account in future development of MailEnable and MAPI connector then I think it'd be good to write them here

First of all, I've been using Outlook for years with POP3 accounts and I was really looking forward to store all the e-mail and calendar and tasks etc. on the server. However some issues with MAPI connector still make that experience a little uncomfortable.

- importing data from PST: This is something I already submitted here in a separate thread http://forum.mailenable.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=19674 and it is really annoying, I think this should be fixed with the highest priority as the scenario that you start with a clean account via MAPI is very rare, nearly always there is something to import from another source (like PST).

- problems with non-latin characters: After copying contacts from PST to MailEnable account via MAPI connector (1.20 beta) I noticed that all the fields that contain non-latin characters like diacritics are blank or have some encoding information like CHARSET=UTF8 instead of e.g. first name, also sometimes due to that bug the first name appeared in the middle name. I checked that in webmail. After editing the contacts in webmail they properly synchronized back to Outlook.

- Outlook rules: I use many rules of different kind and noticed that when using MAPI connector they are applied only to the e-mails that actually come when Outlook is already opened. When I launched Outlook in the morning and downloaded e-mails that came overnight, unfortunately the rules were not applied to these e-mails. Don't know what is the cause, maybe it's because Outlook just synchronizes the folder and doesn't see these messages as "received mail" because they were in the mailbox before.

- categories and flags support: It's a real show-stopper for me, a fan of Outlook rich e-mail management and tracking features - lack of category and flags support. Outlook allows you to set many types of flags (like Today, Tomorrow, Next week or even flags with custom date and label) and automatically creates a task bound with the message. The same for categories, you can have as many as you like and name them as you need, then categorize e-mails, contacts, tasks, events etc. When using MailEnable MAPI connector, there are no such options. You can assign categories and flags, but with each resynchronization the flags and categories you set are gone. I think it's probably because MailEnable doesn't support them, but in my opinion it should if you decided to offer a special connector for Outlook. I know IMAP offers flagging, but it is only one type of flag (like 1 or 0, flagged or not) and doesn't integrate with tasks, for me it's not enough.

If I encounter any additional problems or think of any additional improvements, I'll let you know. I hope you will find my thoughts useful. I'm really looking forward to seeing MailEnable getting better and better

Should you need any clarification on any of the above issues, I'll be glad to help.

Regards,
Docent

[MailEnable-Nick]

Hi, thanks for the feedback. We have made some changes along these lines, and I'll go into some details for each case.

- importing data from PST: This is something I already submitted here in a separate thread viewtopic.php?f=11&t=19674 and it is really annoying, I think this should be fixed with the highest priority as the scenario that you start with a clean account via MAPI is very rare, nearly always there is something to import from another source (like PST).

I have addressed this one in your other thread.

- problems with non-latin characters: After copying contacts from PST to MailEnable account via MAPI connector (1.20 beta) I noticed that all the fields that contain non-latin characters like diacritics are blank or have some encoding information like CHARSET=UTF8 instead of e.g. first name, also sometimes due to that bug the first name appeared in the middle name. I checked that in webmail. After editing the contacts in webmail they properly synchronized back to Outlook.

We have implemented some corrections to this in 1.2, so give that a go and let us know if there are still any problems there.

- Outlook rules: I use many rules of different kind and noticed that when using MAPI connector they are applied only to the e-mails that actually come when Outlook is already opened. When I launched Outlook in the morning and downloaded e-mails that came overnight, unfortunately the rules were not applied to these e-mails. Don't know what is the cause, maybe it's because Outlook just synchronizes the folder and doesn't see these messages as "received mail" because they were in the mailbox before.

We will add this to our list. Unfortunately the change required to facilitate this is probably a bit too large to be done immediately, but it should be possible to achieve at some point.

- categories and flags support: It's a real show-stopper for me, a fan of Outlook rich e-mail management and tracking features - lack of category and flags support. Outlook allows you to set many types of flags (like Today, Tomorrow, Next week or even flags with custom date and label) and automatically creates a task bound with the message. The same for categories, you can have as many as you like and name them as you need, then categorize e-mails, contacts, tasks, events etc. When using MailEnable MAPI connector, there are no such options. You can assign categories and flags, but with each resynchronization the flags and categories you set are gone. I think it's probably because MailEnable doesn't support them, but in my opinion it should if you decided to offer a special connector for Outlook. I know IMAP offers flagging, but it is only one type of flag (like 1 or 0, flagged or not) and doesn't integrate with tasks, for me it's not enough.

This problem is unlikely to be fixed in the short term, but in the longer term, its something that we are aware of and hope to implement more fully (ie. it is also on our list, but further down). The categories and flags are stored on the client side only, they are not synchronised to the server, since, as you correctly suspect, we do not support arbitrary flags on the server for either webmail or IMAP. What this amounts to is that if you use MAPI purely, your categories and flags should work as you want them to, but if you integrate with webmail as well, we obviously do not have any support there for your custom categories. This also means that any time your client needs to be updated from the server (ie. a change is made on the server that needs to be sync'd to your Outlook, or you choose to reset the folder from the MailEnable menu in Outlook), it will lose any exended category/flags support.

So in summary, thanks for the feedback, have another go with the new release, keep your eyes out as we continue to improve the product, and please continue to inform us of any persisting problems.

Thanks for your support, enjoy the product
Nick.

[Marcusg]

In regards to flags and categories. Would it be hard to eventually create a feature in mail enable that adds sync support for those items?

What I mean to say is I don't care if they don't show up in webmail, and I understand that can take some time to implement properly, but it would be nice to support syncing that arbitrary information even if mail enable doesn't understand it. For instance many phones will also use the same category fields that outlook uses, and both priority and catagories are used in all kinds of outlook com add ins.

Is it possible to just have the MAPI client sync that information as an option even if the mail enable server won't understand it?

[MailEnable-Nick]

Yeh, that would definitely be the first step in the process of implementing that feature. We have been steering clear of changes and additions recently, in favour of achieving stability and quality of what we currently have implemented. We feel that we are pretty close now to having a solid base that we can begin again to build additional features on, so some of these things will be appearing in future releases.

Nick.