Zimbra and Outlook Sent Items

[gallimore]

I would like to share with you a work-around/solution to a problem we encountered with a legacy microsoft access application sending email notifications.

Firstly, we are using ZIMBRA 5.0.16 FOSS edition of the software and are therefore not using outlook with an outlook connector.

The problem relates to the create outlook item method being invoked in the code. When an email notification is generated, outlook is invoked and the reultant email is delivered to the exchange server.

Our first thought was to create an IMPA account in outlook and make it the default account. Mail was then despatched via Zimbra but no record of it being sent was in the zimbra SENT folder. Further research led us to discover that outlook does not allow "Special None Email Folders" to be stored on an IMAP server. (OL2002: How to Use an IMAP Account with Outlook 2002)

To get around this problem we decided to configure Outlook Express as the default email client with an IMAP account to zimbra. Tests with outlook express were promising (although a new folder in zimbra was created called SENT ITEMS). Unfortunately, the access code did not refer to the default email client. Once we uninstalled outlook, however, all worked fine.

As a final step we renamed the special folder (using the IMAP tab) to SENT when we created the account in Outlook Express. We now have the database email notifications going via Zimbra and being recorded in the zimbra SENT folder.

In summary:

1. Uninstall Outlook
2. Configure Outlook Express with a Zimbra IMAP account.
3. Rename the special folder SENT ITEMS to SENT (via the IMAP tab when creating the account)

The only problem we have for the future is when the user changes there authentication password we will also need to chnage the stored password in Outlook Express. (But by then we will have persuaded a developer to change the email notification coding)

Hope this helps some with similar problems.