It is working too well! Zimbra 5 and external mail account searching.

[asrag]

Yesterday I set up my gmail account as an external IMAP account in Zimbra. All seems to work very well. However one thing I noticed may need some attention. I did a global search using is:anywhere <search term> To my surprise it searched inside my external IMAP account (even down to the attachments)!

This is a truly great feature for data aggregation - but I wonder how long the indexing would take if I had used the whole of my 5GB gmail allocation. It would may be useful to have an option to disable indexing on external accounts, or a default limit to the number of items read. As it was the initial sync of the accounts took a longish time compared to a typical IMAP sync of just the mail headers of the external account, and I suspect this might be why.

[phoenix]

Yesterday I set up my gmail account as an external IMAP account in Zimbra. All seems to work very well. However one thing I noticed may need some attention. I did a global search using is:anywhere <search term> To my surprise it searched inside my external IMAP account (even down to the attachments)!

The data from your external account is on your Zimbra server, it's downloaded to your server when it's schedule is run.

This is a truly great feature for data aggregation - but I wonder how long the indexing would take if I had used the whole of my 5GB gmail allocation. It would may be useful to have an option to disable indexing on external accounts, or a default limit to the number of items read. As it was the initial sync of the accounts took a longish time compared to a typical IMAP sync of just the mail headers of the external account, and I suspect this might be why.

We can cope with mailboxes of 5GB, many of our customers (and Zimbra staff) have mailboxes larger than that. The initial slowness would be because we're downloading the whole messages not indexing.

[marginalboy]

Are there options available for disabling the search on external accounts? Our local quotas on the Zimbra installation are much smaller than the quotas on most other accounts that people may be interested in adding. I think the assumption when they're adding the external IMAP account is that it will behave like an IMAP connection, and not count so heavily against their quota.

Is it possible to force Zimbra to view external IMAP accounts as just an IMAP connection?

[marginalboy]

One other quick question/note: we've seen a strange beahvior when one deletes an external IMAP account and then adds it back. If you don't delete the folders individually, the messages in the external IMAP account are duplicated (on the external server).

Should I search/add in Bugzilla, or is this expected behavior?

[phoenix]

Is it possible to force Zimbra to view external IMAP accounts as just an IMAP connection?

No,that's not possible. The whole point of this feature is that it replaces programs like fetchmail and downloads mail to the server.

[phoenix]

One other quick question/note: we've seen a strange beahvior when one deletes an external IMAP account and then adds it back. If you don't delete the folders individually, the messages in the external IMAP account are duplicated (on the external server).

Should I search/add in Bugzilla, or is this expected behavior?

That's not the behaviour I would expect as the email should either be removed from the server or left there depending on the users settings. What you are saying implies (to me, at least) that you seem to think we're uploading the email to the external server - that is definitely not the case. Could you check the external account with a fat client such as Thunderbird to confirm the status of the external account. If you appear to have a duplicate in the Zimbra web ui please check in bugzill and file a report if you don't find anything.

[marginalboy]

Hrm. Thanks for the info!

Perhaps, then, it deserves another name? The "IMAP" moniker does imply something different to most folks, I suspect.

[marginalboy]

That's not the behaviour I would expect as the email should either be removed from the server or left there depending on the users settings. What you are saying implies (to me, at least) that you seem to think we're uploading the email to the external server - that is definitely not the case. Could you check the external account with a fat client such as Thunderbird to confirm the status of the external account. If you appear to have a duplicate in the Zimbra web ui please check in bugzill and file a report if you don't find anything.

The account in question was a Novell Groupwise account which was added via the "External IMAP" interface. Things worked well, but in the process of testing we removed the account (again, via the "External Accounts" interface) and added it back later. When we did so, the Groupwise fat client showed duplicates of every message in every folder, including "Trash"...

We discovered this just today, so we're still playing with it. From that experience (which we were able to reproduce several times) it does appear the messages were being re-copied to the external server. I can't rule out the possibility that it's an artifact of some Novell/Groupwise behavior until we finish testing with a non-Novell account.

[marginalboy]

Just FYI, the duplication of messages does not seem to affect all systems, though in our environment it does so reliably on Novell Groupwise servers.

Thanks for responding so quickly. I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place for enhancement requests, but I would be interested in officially submitting a request to rename that feature. Alternately, it would be great if there were a "enable/disable search for this account" option to effectively avoid the download of all messages.

[marginalboy]

I made an error in my previous post - after clicking "Get External Mail" again, duplicates of messages did finally appear in the non-Groupwise account, as well. I'll see if this has been reported in Bugzilla.