Oh yes, I've seen that behavior, usually it means the PST file is
corrupt or something.

I was just trying to determine on whether this behavior is some sort
of engineering decision where basically Outlook tries to replicate
what it does to the PST file.
Or bad engineering.
Or intentionally sabotage the IMAP experience, because it's a really
bad experience with this behavior.

Scott

On Sunday, 27/10/2024 at 10:43 Paul Smith* via mailop wrote:




On 27/10/2024 09:40, Scott Q. via mailop wrote:
 

 Has anyone else noticed that Outlook doesn't seem to make use of
(UID) COPY commands in IMAP ? When you copy/move messages it downloads
them and appends them instead which makes the entire process quite
slow. Usually when it does that it also seems to re-arrange the
headers.


 

Yes, we have noticed this. It's a stupid decision. It's 20-30 bytes of
data transfer to copy a message using IMAP, it's potentially MB of
data to download and then APPEND.

Not only that, but our server uses links to copy a message, so if a
'COPY' command is sent, it takes up a few more bytes on the server
disk for each copy of the message. With the download/APPEND method it
has to store the whole new message again. Even if it did a hash on the
message contents and searched for duplicates that way, that's work
that should be unnecessary, and, as you say, there's no guarantee the
uploaded message will be byte-for-byte exactly what the downloaded
message was.



(A slightly-related thing we have seen is that occasionally, Outlook
will go, for want of a better word, 'loopy' (pun intended). It will
download and APPEND the message, and then delete it, and start again,
and do this repeatedly - many times a minute. The server responds
quickly, and with an OK response, and Outlook logs no errors, just
does it. The user is often unaware of this, but we have seen cases
where it has APPENDED and then deleted the same message >1000 times
before someone spotted it. This adds quite a lot of load to the server
because of the APPEND rather than COPY, and also, if the server is
doing any sort of message auditing/archiving, those 1000+ copies of
the same message can really use up hard disk space...)




 
Are there any reasons why it might be beneficial to do it this way ? 

 

None at all













Paul
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