Application Development Software

There is another thread "Phantom IMAP folders", but jay thought it would be better to start a new one for this discussion. Here goes.

What do I mean with phantom IMAP folders? Now and then some of my users complain about IMAP folders that are not visible neither on the server nor in Messenger Express, but their IMAP client shows them and won't let the user delete them.

Answers to jay's questions:

1. version you're running (output from imsimta version).

iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 HotFix 1.17 (built Jun 23 2003)
libimta.so 5.2 HotFix 1.17 (built 15:54:02, Jun 23 2003)
SunOS camelot 5.9 Generic_112233-07 sun4u sparc

2. The exact steps that were followed to create the problem.

The exact steps to reproduce have not been found, but I believe it has something to do with different IMAP clients and their way of handling folder subscriptions. I remember one user had moved from Outlook Express to Outlook and got this problem. Right now I have a user that thinks he created the folders using Outlook 98 and is now running Outlook 2003 when the problem showed.

3. the exact symptoms.

As stated above, folders are visible in IMAP clients but do not exist on the server or in Messenger Express. Trying to delete them from the IMAP client results in an error message.

Logging in to the account using a freshly installed Outlook on a freshly installed Windows system doesn't help, which means the inconsistency is on the server side.

Creating folders with the same names using mboxutil is no problem, but the problem persists when they are deleted again.