The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

This past week we had a prospective customer putting one of our Zimbra hosting services through the wringer, testing e-mail, calendar and contact synchronization. He noticed when moving e-mail from his inbox to a subdirectory (aka directory or folder), he duplicated e-mail instead of the expected process of “moving” e-mail: copying and deleting.

We traced this anomaly to his testing environment: he had both the Zimbra web interface open and Mail.app. We suspected because they are both active IMAP clients attempting to synchronize their data with the server, organizational changes made in one while the other is also operating may lead to the unintended duplication of some e-mail.

With this hypothesis, we were able to duplicate the issue using Entourage and Mail.app syncing to Apple’s .Mac IMAP service. Windows systems with IMAP mail clients exhibit the same behavior, suggesting this is an issue inherent to the IMAP standard.

Resolution: close one of the active IMAP clients, or set one to synchronize materially less frequently.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 9:11 am and is filed under .Mac, Mail, Troubleshooting, Zimbra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.