Posts Tagged ‘Outlook’

ActiveSync changes to help with stuck devices

Posted on: July 8th, 2025 by

ActiveSync is the protocol used to synchronize various mobile devices, desktop clients, as well as Outlook.

While mobile device synchronization works mostly without issues via this protocol, Outlook can get stuck in various, hard to diagnose, situations.
This is especially problematic as those situations often are caused by issues invisible to the user. Outlook will simply stop synchronizing partially or completely.

Today we deploy an update with two remediable measures.

1. We force various default folders to always be synchronized, because Outlook does not handle the absence of those folders well.
This is visible in the ActiveSync configuration UI in the webclient:

2. We mark devices that are detected to be stuck in a loop as broken. These devices have to be manually reset according to the procedure outlined in the knowledgebase.

For broken devices Outlook will now report the disconnected state, instead of showing connected while failing to synchronize. This should help to detect this situation and allow you to reset early.

As always, if you have questions or concerns, you are very welcome to contact Support.

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ActiveSync broken by Windows update..

Posted on: February 8th, 2024 by

Since last weekend, Support received a few reports from users who saw problems with Outlook ActiveSync synchronization towards Kolab Now. No emails were synchronized to their inbox, and the content of the Outlook Inbox would not match the inbox in the Kolab Webclient.

After some investigation it was realized, that Microsoft had provided (and automatically deployed) a new update on February 1st, and that this update caused the faulty behavior. The new version was: 2401 (various build numbers).

Rolling back Outlook resolved the issue for all users and brought back the normal behavior, and outlook would again synchronize email to the inbox.

A short version of the downgrade procedure is:

  • Find the version to downgrade to at the Microsoft site.
  • Disable automatic updates via Start -> Settings -> Windows Updates
  • Close down Outlook.
  • Open an admin shell.
    • Run: C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun\OfficeC2RClient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.17029.20108
    • (change 16.0.17029.20108 if you want to roll back to an even older version).
  • Start Outlook again.

Please seek further information about rollback of outlook versions at the Microsoft support site.

2024-02-23 – Update: We had a few users asking when we will have a fix for this issue. To that we must refer to the Microsoft support article about the issue, which can be found here. In short they lightly suggest, that the patch will be released on 1st of April (We do not think that this is an April Fool’s joke ).

 

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Outlook and return options to LSUB

Posted on: January 9th, 2019 by

A while back, users started to experience issues with IMAP LIST Extension for Special-Use Mailboxes. This to a level where a decision was made to temporarily suspend supporting Special-Use at Kolab Now.

Lately we have found ways to get around the problems that were present back then, and over the change of the year we introduced an update that, among other great improvements, contained these solutions and re-enabled the Special-Use.

Unfortunately, meanwhile Microsoft has also updated Outlook, and their update has changed the return options that Outlook is using with the LSUB command on the IMAP server.

This has caused issues for some users, who connect Outlook to Kolab Now via IMAP. Those users are suddenly not able to see some of their folders and mails in Outlook. The folders are perfectly visible in the web client and in other IMAP clients like mobile clients, Mac Mail and Thunderbird.

While the RFC compliance issue (the LSUB command does not accept a client specifying RETURN options) certainly has been made visible by Microsoft changing the behavior of Outlook, inversely Kolab Now providing an update to the benefit of all other clients has suddenly shown the related Outlook behavior to be faulty.

The root cause of the issue can be narrowed down to the expectations from Cyrus IMAP while parsing the LSUB command. Besides filing an upstream ticket, Kolab Systems has engaged in this issue and is contributing a fix to the Cyrus IMAP code. This fix is now going through test and QA, and should be ready to be deployed to Kolab Now soon.

If you are one of the users, who has problems because you are connecting Outlook to Kolab Now via IMAP, then you can work around the issue by – either using another IMAP client – or by connecting your Outlook to Kolab Now via ActiveSync, until the fix for Cyrus IMAP is ready and deployed.

If you have any questions or concerns in this context, then please contact support@kolabnow.com.

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