Infrasonic wrote:Mail app will do any IMAP/POP3 including Gmail. It's pretty stable these days
Windows Live Mail worked well and allowed synching not only of Microsoft (Hotmail, Live, outlook.com) email services but also IMAP and POP. Its notable advantage was that it would also synch contacts and calendar from Hotmail et al. Its one restriction (by design) was that it could only synch one Hotmail (etc) service at any one time: you needed to log in and out of each such service if you had more than one. It was common to use IMAP for email while using hotmail et al for calendar and contacts synching.
Windows 10 Mail and the current webmail outlook.com clients by contrast have major deficiencies when e.g. connecting to IMAP accounts, These deficiencies appear to be by design. Microsoft has publicly denied this so perhaps everything has been quietly fixed in the last few months...
- special folders (Inbox, Sent Items etc) cannot be re-specified
- synchronisation of Sent Items is not implemented
- a Root folder name cannot be specified
An example:
Mail is designed to put sent items in the Sent Items folder that is at the same IMAP level as Inbox. If the mail server has Sent Items (or Sent, or....) one level down the IMAP folder tree, Mail's Sent Items has nowhere to synch with (because a Root Folder name cannot be specified). If a Root Folder could be specified, it still wouldn't work if the IMAP server used Sent instead of Sent Items as the folder name for sent items (because Mail will not let folder names of special folders be re-specified).
And if both these were, in fact, implemented in Mail, synching of Sent Items still wouldn't work if Mail were working via outlook.com on an IMAP connected account because the developers of outlook.com decided not to implement it.
The development teams of both products have decided to ignore a fundamental tenet of IMAP which is that the client adopts whatever folders and folder structure given to it (on request) by the server. (The client can request the server to add/change/delete a folder; the server may or may not comply, as it wishes).
It is probably no coincidence that:
- Gmail (for most users) is accessed via IMAP
- synching of Sent Items in outlook.com or O365 (i.e. Exchange-based) accounts works fine.
There are two underlying deficiencies that need sorting:
- mapping of Mail's folder names to the server's folder names (the IMAP convention is that it is the server that defines the names)
- ability to set a root folder such that folders can be on the same level as the root or one level below
Microsoft has assumed that all third-party mail services have folder names and folder positioning (relative to the Root folder) that are the same as Microsoft's.
In the real world this is not so. When an IMAP client is being set up, it is supposed to get folder names and folder positioning from the server, not attempt to impose its own version and the find unsurprisingly that folder synching doesn't work.
Equally unsurprisingly, setting the client up using Exchange Server protocols doesn't have problems because Microsoft is in control of the products at either end. Even account configuration was automated using auto-discovery that normally works very well.
By comparison, in the desktop Outlook world it was possible (until Outlook 2013 appeared) to define IMAP root folder name and map names for the 'special' folders (e.g. Sent). Outlook 2013 and later removed some of this flexibility.
Microsoft has been aware of the issue since early 2015. It knows that the problem does not exist for those who use Mail with (at the back end) outlook.com or O365 mail or onsite Exchange Server - all with the MAPI over HTTP transport protocol and other Exchange Server mail management services instead of IMAP.
In other words:
- if you use a Microsoft back-end product you are fine
- If you use someone else's IMAP and if doesn't work with our Mail client, well that's business. This is in spite of the de facto IMAP rule that the server tells the client (on request) what folder names and structure (.e.g root folder level) is has and the client must conform to it.
I'm not sure I blame Microsoft for this product deficiency: Microsoft offers the best
chargeable mail / calendar / contacts with distribution lists / etc etc platform in existence; Gmail for Business is a poor competitor.
But I DO blame Microsoft for perennially ducking and weaving the issue and claiming that Mail's IMAP shortcomings are just bugs that will be fixed.
Mail is a product designed to work with Microsoft's mail services and only those, and even then it is weak. It also still needs proper testing to remove an infamous bug that can cause it to Synch fruitlessly without end; the only way to stop it is to remove and re-add the account.
Compared with Windows Live Mail (WLM) it is a joke, and Mail's only saving grace is that - intentionally - it supports (or appears to support...) MAPI-over-HTTP connections to Exchange Server, something deliberately denied to WLM.
I could go on. For example, defining distribution groups (to email members of a club, for example) is – unbelievably – not supported. There are various very crude fudges to get round the restriction but again the lack appears to be ‘by design’.
Subscribe to O365 mail at £55 p.a., add Outlook (an old Outlook 2010 is fine) and you have the best email/contacts/calendar service available with almost all of the functionality of an on-premises business Exchange Server service.
But Microsoft has deliberately opened a big (and expanding) gap between its chargeable and free email/calendar/contacts services. Windows Live Mail worked too well and had to be sidelined, and Microsoft's (sensible) move of Hotmail / Live/ outlook.com services to an Exchange Server back-end was the ideal opportunity. How? WLM was simply not upgraded to support Exchange Server.
And that was really the end of WLM.
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