Deleting localcache.db breaks address list
One of the common solutions to several Outlook Connector problems is to deleted your localcache.db, effectively resetting Outlook Connector and letting it start from scratch. This shouldn’t be required on a regular basis, but a database reset is sitll occasionally needed.
After doing so, when you compose a new message Outlook may indicate that “The Address list could not be displayed”
First off, a workaround to avoid the problem entirely: Rather then just deleting localcache.db, instead, create a new profile. To create a new profile:
- Shut down Outlook.
- Open Windows Task Manager (press CTRL-ALT-DEL, this will either start Task Manager, or give you a menu to start Task Manager)
- Go to the “Processes” tab, make sure that Outlook.exe is not listed. If it is, select it and press “End Task”
- Open the control panel.
- Open the Mail item. (Note that on 64-bit systems, go into “View 32-bit control panel items” to find the “Mail” icon)
- Select “Show Profiles”
- Create a new profile, and set up Outlook Connector normally.
- If desired, you can also remove the old profile from this dialog, but I’d suggest keeping it until the new profile is up and running
If you’d rather fix the problem without creating a new profile, follow these directions instead:
- Start Outlook
- Go to Tools -> Email Accounts -> “View or change existing directories or address books”, remove existing Outlook Address Book.
- Shut down Outlook. It wouldn’t hurt to check in Task Manager (Steps #2 and #3 in the previous list) to make sure Outlook bothered to shut down.
- Start Outlook.
- In Outlook under Tools -> Email Accounts -> “View or change existing directories or address books” add a new Outlook Address Book.
- Shut down Outlook and restart.
- Select the Contacts folder and wait for it to synchronize.
- Right click on the local Contacts folder, choose Properties.
- Go to the [Outlook Address Book] tab, then tick option to ‘Show this folder as an e-mail address book’, then click “OK”
- You can optionally add other Contacts folders to the addressbook, allowing these other folders to be used more easily when creating a new message. Repeat steps #7 through #9 for each additional folder.
Also let me mention that this particular problem isn’t limited to Outlook Connector, it can happen with a PST too if the PST becomes corrupt and you either delete it and recreate it, change the default PST, or if ScanPST recreates your Contacts folder.
MultiPOP and Gmail
MDaemon has a feature called MultiPOP which, when enabled, will cause MDaemon to download all messages from one or more POP3 accounts and deliver them directly to a MDaemon user’s mailbox.
The dialog has simple hostname, username, password fields, plus options to leave mail on server or not. What isn’t obvious is how to support hosts like Gmail, which require SSL. As it turns out, MDaemon actually does support Gmail, and other SSL enabled POP3 hosts.
There are a number of ways to access the MultiPOP configuration for an account, through MDaemon’s account editor, through WorldClient or WebAdmin (both web options only being available if the user is allowed to use MultiPOP).
To set up MultiPOP to pull mail from a POP3 account which requires SSL, open the MultiPOP dialog, enter the hostname or POP3 server name followed by :995
:995 tells MDaemon to use port 995, and MDaemon automatically switches to SSL mode since SSL is required for port 995.
For Gmail, enter the hostname “mail.gmail.com:995″, the username which must include the @domain portion. For example, for dave.warren@gmail.com, you need to enter the full dave.warren@gmail.com address, not just “dave.warren”
For Gmail you should set MDaemon to delete mail from the server as Gmail doesn’t account honour this, instead Gmail allows you to control what happens to mail after it’s downloaded (Leave it in the Inbox, Archive it, Delete it)
Note that the instructions are the same for googlemail.com, and for other mailboxes hosted by Google, just use the appropriate email address in the username field.
One other thing to be aware of with Gmail in particular, Gmail doesn’t automatically enable POP3 access, you need to enable it by logging in to Gmail, going to Settings, then to the POP section and setting the appropriate option. If you choose to download all mail, Gmail only offers a few hundred messages at once, so if you are intending to download a massive Gmail mailbox into MDaemon, MDaemon will take some time as messages are downloaded in blocks of about 500 messages at a time.
UPDATE (2008/10/02): One other thing I forgot to mention, MDaemon must have SSL enabled. To enable SSL in MDaemon 10, go to the Security menu, choose Security, then go to “SSL & TLS” and enable the “Enable SSL…” option.
iPhone/iPod Touch SyncML clients
The iPhone is now over a month old, and good news, there are two SyncML clients available. I’ve had the opportunity to play with both briefly.
Funambol is the free/opensource offering, it worked reasonably well in iPhone OS 2.0.0, but since upgrading to 2.0.1, it appears to perform a slowsync on every synchronization, resulting in potential duplicates, as well as the inability to delete items on either side. For this reason, I’m not recommending it at this time.
Synthesis’ SyncML client is currently free, but will become a paid commercial product in the future, once Calendar support is added.
The initial version of the Synthesis client didn’t function at all with MDaemon’s SyncML server, Synthesis reported that the problem was fixed over a week ago, but it was just finally approved by Apple last night, and so far, it works great.
This is my current personal choice for SyncML client, I will post a more detailed review down the road once I have a bit more experience with it.
In both cases, the clients only support synchronizing the Contacts database, not the Calendar database (Apple didn’t bother with a Calendar API), nor Tasks (Apple didn’t bother to write a Tasks application)
keep looking »