Application Development Software

When the messaging server was first installed and I setup my Dell Axim x30 running Pocket PC Mobile 2003 Second Edition and Pocket Outlook to check my email account using IMAP everything seemed to work wonderfully. As a matter of fact, I eventually setup my Pocket Outlook to check several different IMAP accounts on the server and they all worked well. Things ran smoothly for many months.

Then something changed. And I am not sure what. For some reason (I can't remember now) I removed one of the email accounts from my Pocket Outlook. I eventually setup Pocket Outlook to check that account again but from that point forward it seemed to take FOREVER to "download folders." It took me some time to figure-out why Pocket Outlook was behaving that way--it was enumerating EVERY folder for EVERY user in our system (at the time there were approx. 3,000 users). It was enumerating them and putting them under "Shared Folders" in the "Manage Folders" area of Pocket Outlook.

In Outlook and Outlook Express there is a setting to prevent this sort of behavior from happening (select the "show only subscribed folders" setting) but that is not an option in Pocket Outlook. The checkbox to the left of the "Shared Folders" selection under the "Manage Folders" area of Pocket Outlook is cleared... but it seems that Pocket Outlook feels like it must first enumerate ALL the folders of ALL the users before it will honor my cleared-checkbox choice.

The completely INSANE part of this whole issue is that I know for a fact that only 10 or fewer users have designated any of their IMAP/HTTP email folders as "shared." Why in the world is the messaging server advertising to every Outlook, Outlook Express, and Pocket Outlook that EVERY user has "potentially" shared EVERY folder? The messaging server did not behave that way when it was first installed and configured and I can think of no major changes in the messaging server's configuration that has changed since that time.

Furthermore, while any account on this server I now configure within Pocket Outlook will behave this same exact way, the accounts that I had previously setup are behaving "the right way" (i.e. the way they behaved when they were first configured--they do NOT take FOREVER to attempt to download EVERYBODY's folders). Just to make things even crazier I reconfigured one of the "well-behaved" accounts in Pocket Outlook to check a different account (all I did was change the login name and password--left all other settings exactly the same), this previously well-behaved account is NOW misbehaving and attempting to download every-frickin'-folder on the email system!

I know... computers do what you tell them to do--NOT what you want them to do. While I cannot think of any messaging server configuration changes that would explain this behavior there has obviously been some change or changes. But I'll be a monkey's uncle if I can figure it out!