Subject: shared folders with outlook

From: "inness" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 17:25:23 -0700

hi all,

this is my first time posting to the list here, so if it turns out that
i'm posting to the wrong list, or that my question has been answered in
some documentation that i've missed, please point me in the right
direction.

now then, on to the issue at hand. i'm trying to set up shared folders
for some users i support. they all use either outlook (2000 or XP) or
outlook express (6.0) and are unwilling to switch to something with
better imap support. i've gotten the shared folders set up per the
documentation, but i'm having real trouble getting both outlook and
outlook express to reliably access the shared folders.

if i subscribe to the folders first with mozilla, or by manually
modifying the user's .mailboxlist file, when i open outlook, it will
correctly show the shared folders, and i can browse the contents, etc.
however, if i were to open up the "imap folders" box in outlook, it
lists those shared folders under the "subscribed" list, but not the
"all" list. if i were to uncheck the "show only subscribed folders" box,
i would no longer have access to the shared folders. the main problem is
that if i unsubscribe from a folder, there's no way to resubscribe
except by modifying the .mailboxlist file or by using a different client
(like mozilla) because the folder doesn't show up in the "all" list. i
have tried different settings in the "root folder path", like INBOX,
#shared, #shared\, etc. the only thing that works at all is leaving it
blank, which results in the symptoms just explained.

as for outlook express (oe), i've had limited success. the only way to
get oe to recognize the shared folders at all is to set the root folder
path to #shared. even then, it's shakey. if i open the imap folders box
in oe, i can see the folders, but if i click the reset button, i get an
error that "your specified root folder path of #shared could neither be
found nor created..." the other thing is that i created a couple new
folders under the #shared hierarchy with outlook, and then because i
couldn't reset the folder list with oe, i could never see those new
folders. i tried restarting oe, changing the namespace and then changing
it back, no dice. however when i created some new folders with oe, when
i tried outlook, it recognized them automatically. i then tried changing
oe's root folder path to blank, let it sync up (at which point it no
longer recognized the shared folders), then when i set it back to
#shared, i got the same error again, and now i can't get the shared list
back at all... not sure why sometimes it works and sometimes not...

it seems to me that these are both problems with how outlook and oe
handle the #shared namespace? is there some way to get around this? is
there a change in the works for uw-imapd that would circumvent this
problem? in the current condition, it would be an administrative
nightmare to let tech-unsavvy users use shared folders, not to mention
the problem that the oe users wouldn't be able to see the newly created
folders.

thanks much for anybody's help!

-inness

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