127049 - Problems importing Outlook's 'Sent Items' folder

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[Tommy Amstrad]

During the testing of bug 125131 I found this additional problem.

After importing my messages from Outlook 2000, all meesages in 'Sent items' have
problems with the From and To fields. Here is that last message taken from the
mozilla 'Sent Items' file as an example:

  From - Wed, 20 Feb 2002 18:53:33
  To: Rob, "Smith;", Glen, "Smith;", Daryl, Smith
  Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 18:56:00 -0000
  Subject: Email
  From: Bill, Smith
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

  Message body text was 'ere

The actual 'To' field should be something like (not sure of the correct separator):

  Rob Smith; Glen Smith; Daryl Smith

and the 'From' should be:

  Bill Smith

If I move this message to the 'Local Folders' -> 'Sent' folder so I can see the 
Recipent list, then it shows 6 entries, Since it is taking the comma as the
seperator.

Comment 1

[Cavin Song]

> If I move this message to the 'Local Folders' -> 'Sent' folder so I can see
> the Recipent list, then it shows 6 entries, Since it is taking the comma as 
> the seperator.
>
So it doesn't show 6 recipients after you've imported the mail and view the msg 
(that's why you have to move it Local Folder/Sent folder to see those)? Please 
clarify.

Comment 2

[Tommy Amstrad]

It doesn't show 6 recipents in the folder 'Mozilla' -> 'Outlook' -> 'Sent Items'
because this folder only has the columns the standard columns (Subject, Sender,
Date etc.) If I open this message from this folder then there are 6 recipents in
the 'To' field.

I simply moved the message to 'Mozilla' -> 'Local Folders' -> 'Sent' to see how
how the reciptent column was displayed. In fact in this folder the Recipent
column only shows the text 'Rob', but viewing the message still shows the 6
recipents in the 'To' field.

Comment 3

[Cavin Song]

Ok, I see what you mean.

Just to give more details on how to reproduce the problem:

1. On Outlook create a contact with "Full Name" set to something like "QA 20" 
and a second contact with "Full Name" set to "Cavin Song".
2. Send a message from Outlook and in the To: field type in "Cavin Song" and "QA 
20" (Outlook will automatically fill in the email addresses for you when you 
send the msg). Then enter something in Subject and body and send the msg.
3. Run Mozilla and import Outlook mail. 
4. Open folder "Sent Items" and double click on the msg you just sent and you'll 
see that the To: line looks like:

  To: Cavin, "Song;", QA, 20

In other words, Outlook stores the following To: line in it's msg store:

  To: Cavin Song; QA 20

because "Cavin Song" and "QA 20" are aliases and it knows how to expand them. On 
the other hand, Mozilla doesn't know anything about the names/aliases so it 
simply parses the names as if they were RFC822 addresses. That's why the 
translation (conversion) takes place and I think it's done by the compose module 
(the top level function is CreateAndSendMessage()).

Comment 4

[Cavin Song]

Assigning to myself and ccing JF because it's related to his module.

Comment 5

[Gene Wood]

I encountered the same situation and here is some more information on it.

There are two problems here.
The one that is mentioned here is the issue regarding the comma parsing. This is
a small fix. The bigger problem is that for whatever reason, the sent folder in
an Outlook PST (I'm using Outlook 2002) Isn't storing full header information
for the emails. There is no email address stored, just the users name (full
name) which the email was sent to. I tried a few different things when importing
and found a workaround.

What I did was in Outlook, I moved everything from my sent folder into a
temporary folder up on an IMAP4 mail server. Then from within Mozilla, I moved
everything out of that temporary folder on the IMAP server into my Sent Items
folder. This process forced Outlook to put headers on the emails. Now my sent
items have the users full name AS WELL AS the email address.

Cavin, email me if you have any more questions about this, I can provide more
information. [e-mail]

-Gene Wood

2. 

Comment 6

[Gene Wood]

One other point that may be obvious here is that this problem isn't confined to
sent items. It applies to any outlook "item" which hasn't been sent out through
some kind of smtp thing. An example of another "item" besides a sent email would
be a posted item. In outlook 2002 (and maybe ealier outlooks) you can post to a
folder, it's one of the optional items you can create (e.g. Appointment,
Contact, Task, Note, Mail Message, and Post in this folder). I often add notes
to folders in this form. These items lose the same information that sent items do.

-Gene Wood

Comment 7

[wallycrooze]

*** Bug 190412 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Peter Kirk]

Please see bug 207156. The kind of fix I am suggesting for that one would fix
this one too, similarly to but perhaps more cleanly than Gene Wood's workaround
for this one.

Comment 9

[Jason M. Abels]

I can confirm this bug that this bug happens, but I've not tried it on any new
builds recently.

Can someone who uses Outlook 2000 or XP please try this and see if it still happens?

Comment 10

[Jason M. Abels]

I can confirm this still happens (it does it with other outlook-only items like
tasks and calender, but sent-mail is the most problematic.

My solution was to keep my mail on the exchange server and connect to the imap.
That seems to keep the formatting OK, so it must be something with the Import tool.

Comment 11

[Joachim]

I can confirm this still happens with 1.6a

Comment 12

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

*** Bug 183124 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Doug Wright]

*** Bug 215710 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

would you expect this to be gone?   (I am not able to test)

Comment 15

[David :Bienvenu]

I doubt this is fixed - those lines don't look like valid rfc822 address lines...but I haven't tried it.

Comment 16

[jom]

I have a similar problem importing Outlook 2003 into Thunderbird 2.0.0.4:

When Thunderbird imports Outlook emails from "Sent Items", it does not import the email addresses correctly. The result is that you can only see the names of the people you sent emails to, and not their email addresses.

There is no problem with importing the "Inbox" emails - Thunderbird correctly imports both the names and the email addresses.