Mail Issues, Clients Perspective!

I wonder why there's so few articles discussing email issues as in clients perspective. Usually what we discuss is about servers and protocols. You know what, I believe the most valuable thing and also the center of any kind of messaging system is the users, the people. Users are the ones that should take benefits of the system or otherwise the real victims would be the users. So, we should take it bottom-up from users to servers, shouldn't we?

My office uses Ms Outlook mostly/officially as mail clients. And as we all usually do, the email clients are treated as dashboard. We keep it open all the time, from the moment we take a seat until we leave office, Ms Outlook is sitting there. The pop up notification as emails came in is just nice.

Yes, that's why I use Ms Outlook in the center of my universe. Why not using it as the spot where all things happen, like putting gmail account in it, also hotmail. Yes hotmail's Outlook Connector is a nice little thing that makes our universe centered in our desktop, the Ms Outlook to be precise. O, yea, put in also your email accounts from your side job. Use Pop3 or IMAP4 connection, isn't that fine or what? Now you are ready to go.

But then you begin to feel it. The slowliness. Ms outlook or any kind of email client is supposed to be multithreaded, but in this case still you need to queue what you are doing. That's why you still see the mail in the outbox is still hanging in there, not knowing when it will get out from your outbox and really sent. In cases like this, I usually recommend my users to:

1. "Cancel server request" by right clicking the outlook icon in the system tray.

2. Click in the "send and receive" button.

3. Those two steps sometime solve the problem (the outgoing emails are gone and move to sent folder), but it is quite often it doesn't. If it doesn't solve it then..

4. Quit outlook (it will prompt you to click ok although there are emails in the outgoing folder) and then open outlook again. You need to wait a few seconds before starting MsOutlook again to give time for the previous Outlook process to stop.

It's very annoying when you are in the middle of something big and something intercepts only because some silly email is hanging in the outbox folder and don't want to leave from there. I dont have much data yet, but I am damn sure that's because queueing problems, usually happen with users that have many mail accounts. Let's dig deeper...

The issues might arise from:

1. Simply too many accounts, as a generic issue in email client. Frankly I doubt this theory, because it happens with outlook with only two accounts too. One exchange account and another is IMAP4 account.

2. Incompatibility between Mail Server and client. This could be it, non exchange accounts are usually hosted in Linux servers. However, this shouldn't be the cause since operating system should not have anything to do with the mail server's job, they should be independent. The mail system should only concerns with protocols, credentials, and DNS.

3. Ms Outlook has handicaps to handle IMAP4 or other than MAPI and RPC over HTTP. I have a stong feeling about this as the cause. Can anybody provide evidence to approve or disapprove it? I will really appreciate it.

4. Queueing or multithread problems with Ms Outlook to handle too many email accounts. Again, any evidence to prove or disapprove it would be very appreciated.

That's all folk. I am setting up a small lab consist of two exchange servers (front and back server topology), a linux server for an IMAP4 email server, and two desktop for email clients. I will back to you to report the findings.

The Sender Policy Framework, the hot shot retired or revived?

Spam issues has never been easy. We know that. The ancient IT heroes have told us stories how SMTP was not meant to be built secure. But now, in the era of gadgets, mobility, and messaging everywhere, I am sure it is worth to take a look at what we have as anti spam.

I am running exchange servers for in the office. Those servers are great. Really, you can have everything you can expect from a mail server with so many pluses. With exchange you will have much more than mail, you will have the whole business attached with you.

Well, there is a slight thing you need to know. It's the capability to handle spam emails that is a little short there. Exchange 2003 is not hot with it. With me, I put a GFI Mail Essentials installed in the back end. With a litte fine-tuning, everything is fine. Until then..

My boss was a bit pissed off by some emails he sent did not delivered to some recipients. He sent it from his phone with IMAP protocol. I definitely looked very stupid because the recipients were in the same domain. Our domain. OK, I won't assume a thing. I needed to look. Then I found the email was sitting there in the Junk Mail folder. Yes, I frowned. How come emails from the same domain get into junk folder?

I am sure to fix this, I need to mock around the exchange server, again.

My first suspect was the Intelligent Message Filtering in the Exchange Server. To provide proof I have to change the setting in the Global Setting - Message Delivery. Change some setting, increasing the SCL level for Junk Mail. No Luck.

Well, how about disable the Intelligent Message Filtering filter from the SMTP at all the servers. Yes I did it, and still no luck.

My second suspect was the GFI Mail Essentials settings. I change the Sender Policy Filter level to Low, and voila! it works.

Well yea, it works, now but still leave me with wonder, why the heck this SPF marks emails from cellphone in the same domain as Junk? I checked the SPF text in my DNS. it allows all to send email. So it should be ok. But why not???