Forums & Blog

Obviously I don't know how to search, since I swear I saw this answered before.

I need to change a user account "user1"  to an alias.  Problem is that there are a bunch of messages in the Inbox for that account "user1".  I want to move those messages to a different user's Inbox ("user2").  Then, I can delete the "user1" account and recreate it as an alias.  How do I move the messages?  I remember it had something to do with moving the *.grp files, but I don't want to mess anything up.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to setup an IMAP account for both users in an email client (Outlook, Outlook Express, etc) and just drag and drop.  This prevents any deleting of the mailbox.cfg file and that way the dates and times should still all be correct.

slalomdrew:

One of the easiest ways to do this is to setup an IMAP account for both users in an email client (Outlook, Outlook Express, etc) and just drag and drop.  This prevents any deleting of the mailbox.cfg file and that way the dates and times should still all be correct.

That makes sense.  IIRC there was an issue with the date/timestamp getting messed up.  There's only about 60 messages in the box so this should work... thanks! 

Just to warn you, don't use Thunderbird or other Mozilla mail clients to drag and drop messages to IMAP account (on SmarterMail), it doesn't work for some reason. You should be OK when using Outlook or Outlook Express.

Kybla:

Just to warn you, don't use Thunderbird or other Mozilla mail clients to drag and drop messages to IMAP account (on SmarterMail), it doesn't work for some reason. You should be OK when using Outlook or Outlook Express.

That's strange... I use Thunderbird myself, and I have three different accounts set up as IMAP accounts in Thunderbird.  Two are on the same domain and one is different, but they are all on my SM4 server.  I move messages between them all the time.  Just did it to make sure and it worked fine. 

Just an update (and thanks for the advice)...

I used the IMAP method to move the messages and it worked great.  And for the record, it worked great in Thunderbird, so I'm not sure why others have had trouble with it. 

Thanks for your report. I'm glad it worked for you. Just to be sure - did you copy multiple messages at once? If you really have no problems with copying to the IMAP folder in Thunderbird, you can probably help us (who do have this problem) to find out what to do with it. There is one thread about it here on SM forums: http://forums.smartertools.com/forums/thread/28169.aspx and one, somewhat more extensive, on CrystalTech forums: http://forums.crystaltech.com/index.php/topic,31256.0.html . Could you please look at them and then, if it will still work for you, try to help us to find the difference between your setup and ours? Thanks (and sorry for slightly OT post).

Hmm.  I read through your posts and did a little playing around.  Here's what I found...

When I moved messages between IMAP accounts, it worked fine. I moved about 50 messages back and forth in rapid succession.

However, when I tried to move messages from a folder in Local Folders to one of the IMAP accounts, I couldn't move more than 8 messages at a time without getting the login error.  So, the problem does exist for me too in some fashion.

I think you are on to something with the speed issue you were talking about.  However, this seems like it's more of an issue with Thunderbird than it is with SmarterMail.  As an experiment, has anyone successfully done this with Thunderbird and a different (non-SM) mailserver?  I don't have access to one to try... I have our old Imail server still set up on our Web server for one client to handle sending from a Perl script, but there are no user accounts and thus no messages to play with.

Maybe a place to start would be the Thunderbird forum at mozilla.com to see if this is an issue with other mailservers.  Just an idea.  Pass that along to the people on the CrystalTech forum. 

For what it's worth, I posted this to the Mozilla forum at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=545646.  Feel free to jump in.

Thanks for testing. It really seems that the speed of sending commands can be the issue. I double checked that I don't have any abuse detection set up, because it looks to me like some hidden defence against too much commands in too rapid succesion.

I did try to copy to two other-than-SM IMAP servers in Thunderbird before and as far I tried, it worked. I just copied 193 messages to my account on our webhosting, just to be sure, and no problems at all. They are using Courier-IMAP as an IMAP server. There has to be some misunderstanding between SmarterMail and Thunderbird..

Kybla:

I double checked that I don't have any abuse detection set up, because it looks to me like some hidden defence against too much commands in too rapid succesion.

After I read this, I double checked my abuse detection settings thinking that might shed some light (I have IMAP's abuse settings set as 100 connections within 5 minutes with a block of 10 minutes).  The more I think about it, though, I don't think that that could be the problem anyway.  After doing this failed move of messages, I immediately closed and reopened TBird and (after entering my password again) was able to check for new mail immediately.  If it was an abuse blocking issue, I would not be able to reconnect for 10 minutes, if I understand this correctly. 

Plus, I regularly move large numbers (ok, maybe 30 or 40 at a time) of messages FROM my IMAP folders TO Local Folders (to keep the server clean, no reason to keep them all out there) and I never have a problem doing that.  It's the reverse that seems to be a problem.

Keep an eye on this: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=545646 as one of the moderators had me enable TBird's logging and post it there.  He is looking into it from a TBird perspective.

*EDIT* Oh, I see you have already been there, Kybla.  Never mind.
 

You are right, it wouldn't be abuse detection issue, I'm also able to copy messages from IMAP to Local Folders without interruption. Now we can just hope that someone from SmarterMail or Mozilla will find the heart of the problem..

I have tracked down the source of this bug. It occurs due to how Thunderbird handles literals. During an APPEND command (what the client uses to upload a message to the server), Thunderbird is supposed to tell us how many bytes its about to send. It does correctly specify the number of bytes in the message, but what it actually sends is 2 bytes longer than what it said, due to an extra carriage return/line feed. What happens is that in some circumstances (if it gets those two bytes in a different packet than the rest of the data), it doesn't consider that as part of the literal, and issues Thunderbird a "bad command" error, and Thunderbird gives up.

We will add a workaround for this to keep Thunderbird working smoothly with SmarterMail.
 

Very cool.  Thanks James!  Are you going to try to sneak this into 4.2 in time for the release?

Yes, it will be in 4.2.