[horde] Server side email searches with ActiveSync not working

[Sebastian Arcus]

On 17/04/18 14:53, Sebastian Arcus wrote:
> 
> On 17/04/18 13:16, Ad-Min wrote:
>> Sebastian Arcus-2 wrote
>>> I am struggling to get server side email searches working with 
>>> ActiveSync.
>>>
>>> My setup is:
>>>
>>> Lighttpd 1.4.49
>>> Dovecot 2.2.33
>>> Exim 4.90
>>> PHP 5.6.35
>>> Postgresql 9.2.24
>>> Horde 5.2.17
>>>
>>> I have tested imap searches through Thunderbird (there is an option "run
>>> search on server) and it is working fine and fast. I assume this means
>>> Dovecot is configured correctly and can do imap searches?
>>>
>>> I have tested the Horde email searches on an iPhone 5S with iOS 11.2.6
>>> and a Jolla phone with Sailfish 2.1. Both of them have email configured
>>> in ActiveSync mode. On both of them, if I force them to search on the
>>> server only, they sit there saying "searching" for a few minutes, and
>>> then return no results (and no error either).
>>>
>>> On the server side, I can see the command being sent by the device to
>>> Horde in the individual device ActiveSync log 

</snip>

>>>
>>> But I just can't be sure it is actually passed to Dovecot - at least I
>>> can't see anything in the Dovecot logs to indicate that.
>>>
>>> Are there any other settings needed for ActiveSync server side email
>>> searches to work? Can I troubleshoot this further, or look in any other
>>> logs?
>>>
>>> Any advice much appreciated.
> 
>>
>>
>>
>> I had a similar issue (windows, hmailserver as backend). My problem 
>> was not
>> that it doesn't work, but rather that clients timed out searching very 
>> large
>> mailboxes. I was not able to fix this, but it works fine on smaller
>> mailboxes. You didn't mention anything about mailbox size, so I'm just
>> throwing this out there.
>>
>> I looked at my imap logs on hmailserver and confirmed that the search was
>> actually talking place. The issue was the search took about 4 minutes to
>> complete and the clients (all that I tried) timed out after 60 or 90
>> seconds.
>>
>> I would start by enabling imap logging in your mail server and looking to
>> see if the search is actually talking place. Likely it is (since that 
>> is a
>> working function of horde activesync), so maybe you can track down the 
>> error
>> from there.
> 
> Thank you for answering and the suggestions. In the meanwhile I have 
> spent a number of hours last night investigating. One of the 
> possibilities I considered is large mailboxes which would mean long 
> search time. I logged over telnet to Dovecot and manually ran a SEARCH 
> BODY imap command. This indeed took over 5 minutes to return results.
> 
> Then I configured Lucene FTS indexing plugin in Dovecot - and after 
> indexing the mailbox, the search started over the telnet session went 
> down to less then 1 second! Still, no joy over ActiveSync.
> 
> Then I went and enabled debugging in Dovecot to the highest level of 
> verbosity. Still, there is no sign of SEARCH commands being sent from 
> Horde to Dovecot. I'm not really sure what is happening, but the 
> ActiveSync server-side email search seems to be broken somehow. I have 
> posted a bug report at Horde.org - maybe someone will get a chance to 
> look into this.

OK - I think I finally figured out the mystery. My IMAP server in 
horde/imp/config/backends.local.php was using an old syntax:

$servers['secure-imap'] = array(

This syntax is not even present any more in the current backends.php - 
so I guess it must have been defaulting to the simple IMAP server - 
which, again, I am guessing that it doesn't support server side email 
searches.

I should have read the upgrade DOCS a lot more closely - but it doesn't 
help at all that there are no warning or error messages in the Horde log 
when an ActiveSync device initiates server-side email searches, but the 
back-end doesn't support it (or at least I didn't find any errors in the 
logs, even in debug mode).

Now everything is working fine and server-side searches return results 
correctly. I thought I would post here, in case anyone else stumbles 
over the same problem.