[SOLVED] To: Column displays Sender rather than Recipient

[jtosburn]

I'm planning a migration from cyrus imap to Zimbra, and have been fine tuning imapsync to work with our scenario. I've got it working well with one hitch: when viewing the Sent folder in either the Zimbra web client or Zimbra Desktop, the To column displays my name, rather than the name of the message's recipient. The message itself lists the correct data in the From: and To: fields, and when I do a Show Original, the From: and To: fields are also correct.

I'm using the following imapsync command for Sent messages in order to reconcile the folder names between the two systems:

imapsync --buffersize 8192000 --nosyncacls --subscribe --syncinternaldates --nofoldersizes --skipsize --host1 cyrus.mycompany.com --user1 testuser--passfile1 /home/testuser/pfile --authmech1 PLAIN --folderrec "Sent Items" --prefix1 "Sent Items" --host2 zimbra.mycompany.com --user2 testuser--passfile2 /home/testuser/pfile2 --authmech2 PLAIN --prefix2 "Sent" --useheader Message-ID

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

-Joel

[jtosburn]

Anyone? I tried to reindex the mailbox, but that has no apparent effect. Nor does deleting the messages and re-running imapsync.

I'm pulling out my hair, here!
-Joel

[jtosburn]

OK, I figured out what's going on: my test Zimbra machine is hosting users at user@subdomain.domain.com, but the mail being migrated is from user@domain.com. To Zimbra, they are (correctly) two different users.

Then, for whatever reason, Zimbra does not get the recipients from the mail in the Sent folder for its display in the "To" column as one might think. Instead, it seems to just display the first email address that does not belong to the account owner.

If I access the mail store via Thunderbird / imap, then the Sent folder's "To" column displays the actual recipients. This is what I would expect of Zimbra, too. No matter who sent an email, they are still not the recipients!

To me, it's a bug. One workaround is to append the following to the imapsync command:

--regexmess 's/user\@domain/user\@subdomain\.domain/g'

-Joel

[PhD]

is there any way to fix this post sync? - i just finished syncing 200gb of mail and 175 users to find this problem...

the user's account is user@domain.com
but their "sending address" on the old system was full.name@domain.com - which on the zimbra server, that fullname alias was added to the user account after doing the imapsync... this is an annoying "feature"

[jtosburn]

I still think it's a bug. It's also the kind of thing that makes me do test migrations first.

If I were you I'd just delete everything on the new server in the Sent foldesr that predates your imapsync, and then imapsync again, only running on that folder. Limiting the sync to just the sent messages should mean a sync that runs in an acceptable amount of time. You'll have to tweak the regexmess I posted to something that fits your situation, of course. Test on a single account, rather than 175!

Joel

[PhD]

Yeh I tried that afterwards on a small account. I added the full.name@ alias then imapsync'd and it worked as expected. I think what I'll do is just take each person who complains and do it as it comes. But it would be good if you could reindex the sent folder after syncing the old data so it can recreate the meta data in the db correctly. I don't have time to delete 175 sent folders and resync that folder only...

[jtosburn]

Well, doing them one at a time takes a lot longer than a simple shell script.

By far the best would be for the Zimbra folks to just fix the client such that it displays the address in the To: field in the message header, actually in the To: column. Not exactly rocket science.