[Kde-pim] change IMAP server address

[Romain]

Hi Dan,

Thx for the details!

the other day I thought of a different solution that works for me : for now
whenever that offiice365 GeoDNS junk is not working, i just point a working
server to outlook.office365.com directly in /etc/hosts so that way i don't
have to change anything in the KMail / Akonadi config and it always thinks
it is talking to the same hostname.

not a very hip solution but it #worksforme.


Cheers!
Romain.


On 16 October 2015 at 16:47, Daniel Vrátil <dvratil at kde.org> wrote:

> On čtvrtek 15. října 2015 20:57:08 CEST Romain wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Thx for getting back!
> >
> > Would it make sense to have a dialog that pops up when the user is
> changing
> > the URL, asking if that's pointing to the exact same data ?
> > That would allow to solve this use case without having to throw
> everything
> > away, and the user can reliably decide what to do.
>
> Users tend to out-smart applications thinking they know better and then
> booom
> :) Also users might not be aware of some technical details, like the new
> URL
> actually being a different server with different configuration only
> running on
> top of the same data etc. We cannot expect our users to have enough
> knowledge
> about the underlying infrastructure, IMAP and Akonadi implementation to be
> able to correctly judge the situation.
>
> > To me it seems that a user changing a URL likely means it's the same
> data,
> > otherwise he or she would create a different account/resource.
>
> I think that changing URL to another one that points to the exactly same
> server is a very rare case. More typical situation is that the company
> migrates from mail solution A to mail solution B, telling their employees
> that
> "we migrated from A to B, now B has all your emails that you used to have
> on
> A, except for new emails won't be deliver to A anymore. Please adjust your
> email clients.". Technically, B has the same data as A, but it is an
> import,
> so the emails will have different UIDs.
>
> In fact, we would detect this particular case just fine because
> UIDVALIDITY of
> all folders would change, causing the IMAP resource to re-sync all folders
> from scratch. Which brings as back to start: if changing URL forces full
> resync in almost all cases, why even support it within the resource, and
> not
> force users to create a new resource.
>
>
> Dan
>
> >
> > What do you think ?
>
> > Cheers,
> > Romain.
> >
> > On 14 October 2015 at 11:05, Daniel Vrátil <dvratil at kde.org> wrote:
> > > On Monday, October 5, 2015 10:25:07 AM CEST Romain wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > > I've been hit with a weird issue this morning : my company made the
> > > > 'unfortunate' choice a few years ago to switch from Gmail to
> > > > Office365...
> > > > this morning there were some DNS resolution issues with
> > > > outlook.office365.com not responding.
> > > > I noticed outlook-emeasouth.office365.com was working much better. I
> > > > changed the server address in the KMail / akonadi IMAP resource
> config
> > >
> > > but
> > >
> > > > it seems kmail did not like this at all. the resource was still
> there in
> > > > the akonadi console but KMail did not show it and could not
> access/view
> > >
> > > any
> > >
> > > > mails from KMail. Even reverting to outlook.office365.com,
> rebooting,
> > > > etc... did not work either.
> > > >
> > > > I therefore had to remove the resource entirely and now it's doing a
> new
> > > > full sync from  the server, which is annoying because it contains
> > >
> > > thousands
> > >
> > > > and thousands of emails from way back, but it's done it in the past
> > >
> > > without
> > >
> > > > problems so i'll let it complete.
> > > >
> > > > Are you aware of this behaviour ? is it "allowed" / expected to be
> able
> > >
> > > to
> > >
> > > > change the IMAP server address ? wondering if akonadi does not use
> the
> > > > server address as an identifier somewhere and would get confused if
> it
> > >
> > > gets
> > >
> > > > changed.
> > >
> > > Normally changing the server URL should force the the IMAP resource to
> > > throw
> > > away all cached data and sync everything again (so you would not avoid
> it
> > > anyway), simply because there's no 100% reliable way for us to know
> > > whether
> > > the new URL points to the same server and account as the old one (and
> yes,
> > > we
> > > also use the URL as part of remote identifiers).
> > >
> > > The fact that the resource got stuck for you is unfortunate, this is
> not
> > > very
> > > widely tested feature :-) I tried with my Kolab (because that's the
> only
> > > server that I can access from multiple URLs) and it indeed got stuck
> after
> > > changing server URL, but after restarting Akonadi it synced correctly.
> > >
> > > Thinking about it, it might make sense to disallow changing the URL and
> > > user
> > > name in the IMAP resource once it's configured, forcing people to
> remove
> > > the
> > > IMAP resource and create a new one if they want to change the server
> > > and/or
> > > username, because they will need to sync all their mail from scratch
> > > anyway
> > > and we know that this way it works rather reliably.
> > >
> > > Dan
> > >
> > > > Thanks for letting me know!
> > > > Cheers,
> > > > Romain.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Daniel Vrátil
> > > Email: dvratil at kde.org
> > > Jabber: dan.vratil at kdetalk.net
> > > IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi)
>
> --
> Daniel Vrátil
> www.dvratil.cz | dvratil at kde.org
> IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi, #fedora-kde)
>
> GPG Key: 0x4D69557AECB13683
> Fingerprint: 0ABD FA55 A4E6 BEA9 9A83 EA97 4D69 557A ECB1 3683




-- 
Romain.
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