Issue Kolab (Apheleia IT AG) extensions

[Dennis Rahmen]

Hello,

I have already talked about my issues with the Extensions developed by Kolab at the beginning of 2021 in the Plesk interviews, they could understand my frustration and promised to make the experience better. Sadly, nothing really improved since then.

Small collection of issues:

• "Plesk Premium Email" has "Plesk" in its name and gets heavily promoted from Plesk but does not live up to the standards of plesk itself.
• No direct support channel for the extension and plesk support "Usually takes 1-2 business days" to get an answer from Kolab developers, which is a lie. It takes half a month if you are lucky.
• I said in the Plesk interviews that I usually create at least one ticket every month about some bug in Kolabs extensions, I stopped doing this because some of my tickets for example one from "October 14, 2019" are closed because they used a workaround on my server and promised an update that fixes the cause of the issue. Still waiting on that update and the workaround does not work anymore.
• Plesk Premium Email shared calendars do not work, they were just gone at some point. Same with address books, that was quite horrifying as I got that ticket from a customer!
• The Seafile extension got an update to install the new Seafile Server version (already old version but ok) only on new installations. There were no instructions given on how to upgrade existing installations.
• After I created a new Domain with the Seafile extension enabled and therefore with the new Seafile server version, I noticed that WebDAV is not working. Even excluding the other issues that I had with WebDAV at the end, I could not have worked because they use fastcgi to start the WebDAV server, which is not supported anymore. So they clearly didn't even test this!
• Plesk Premium Email has gotten Ubuntu 20.04 support but regarding some issues in this forum Active Sync is broken
• Mattermost is integrated into Plesk Premium Email and you are logged in to Mattermost when you log in to the webmail, but you are not logged out of Mattermost by login out of the webmail. Which is a security risk since you are able to access Mattermost on its own without being logged into the webmail.
• And the list goes on...

I am paying licenses to get a complete solution that I can manage with a fancy UI, I don't pay to always fiddle around in some config files or search through error logs.
As a result, I can't trust any advertised features of any extension that Kolab developed, not even those I pay for and have "Plesk" in their name!

I would love to sell Plesk Premium Email to more of my customers but can't because it's just not worth the hassle.

Best regards
Dennis Rahmen

 

[Kaspar]

I feel your frustration. I've abandoned Plesk Premium Email a couple of year ago because it hardly works and lacks proper support. From your post it seems it only has gotten worse. It's a shame indeed it carries the Plesk name. I wish I had a solution for you, but I don't.

 

[biotradmeding]

I think that not a quality of a paied service so it must still free until it will we good to sell it as a paid extension.
Maybe the frustration will be mince as a free extension we understand that it's not good

 

[Dennis Rahmen]

Following the Problems I have with Plesk Premium Email currently:

• Autodiscovery does not work. Outlook (M365), Outlook 2016, IOS Mail, Outlook Mobile or any other Mobile Mail App. Basically none of the clients, my customers would have wanted to use, worked.
• ActiveSync:
  • sometimes does not work
  • does not work at all
  • works on Accounts where it is disabled
  • does not work on Accounts where it is enabled.
• Calendar fails to sync Emojis
• Premium features can only be enabled per Subscription, including shared Accounts that don't use the premium features
• Every Email Account can login to every Webmail!
  • So Subscription A has premium features and Subscription B does not
    • Now user from Sub B can login to the webmail from Sub A and access all premium features for free.
• The Interface of the extension is basically useless
  • It does not check for errors unless you expand the domain entry
    • Does not inform you
    • Does not show them for each domain or collectively
  • It reports issues that does not exist
  • The help links are useless
  • Page changing and Items per page settings are buggy
• Spam filter does not work!
  • Spamassain is beeing trained on the "Spam" folder but for some reason Plesk Premium Email creates a new spam folder "INDOX.Spam" where all the spam is moved, so no training happens.
• INBOX.Spam is created as spam folder but is not selected in Roundcube as the special folder for spam and also none of the clients I tested recognice this folder as the spam or junk folder.
• Tasks and Notes do not use the configured background icon as the other pages do if you change it.
• And the Seafile "Integration" I nearly forgot existed because I can't remember the last time I saw it working on any of my installations.

 

[Elompenta]

@Dennis Rahmen Thanks for your feedback here!
Do you have tested again/further? (Your post is from 2022).

We think at the moment about to use the "Premium Mail" (Kolab) Plugin in bigger Environments.
What do you think today about this extension?

 

[Dennis Rahmen]

@Elompenta the issues mentioned in my original posts are still present.
So I would highly recommend AGAINST buying/using any plugin by Kolab (Apheleia IT AG).

This is not some personal hatred against them, its just that it is not possible for me to sell theses services to my customers with a good feeling.
There are serious security risks in there plugins adding on the the usability problems and other problems that are just annoying.

I will give just one example and you can image this for all the other points I mentioned in my posts:
One advertised feature is that when using Premium Mail and Seafile, you have access to you files from the webmail, a bit like Outlook and OneDrive.

This feature basically work for a few days maybe a week or so after my customers started using Seafile.
After that they all got some error that the files could not be loaded from Seafile.

I just searched for the request I opened to this issue, it is from March 16, 2020 14:29:


Its status is "solved", because Kolab confirmed the bug and gave a workaround:


So the issues reappears after every update of Plesk, its components, Premium Mail or Seafile!
And the workaround is to reinstall everything and install in the described order.
AND you have to keep in mind that until a few months ago ALL Seafile data was delete when you disabled the extension.

The original Bug is not solved to this day!!

 

[Elompenta]

@Dennis Rahmen Thanks for your great feedback!

At the moment (after one horrible support case and 2 weeks active testing) i think i cannot sell this to customers, because it not works.. :-/

• There are very simple mail sync features that are not work as expected. I will not debug the extension for free for Plesk here and pay more than 1.000€ for the license every year.. sorry @plesk
• There is an endless loop in the colab package which consume more than 50GB RAM within seconds if a specific outlook client connect in a specific way.
• ... and multiple more "simple things" (i expect as "premium email" product) which are not really working as expected. (I only use the basic kolab without file sea or other plugin. If the base )

We decide internaly to setup a fresh plesk server and test the premium mail there once again in a clean setup.

@Dennis Rahmen like i said, thank you for your effort!
Do you have any alternative suggestin to provide a "premium mail service" for your customers without to use MS-Exchange?

 

[drdna]

• There is an endless loop in the colab package which consume more than 50GB RAM within seconds if a specific outlook client connect in a specific way

@Elompenta this may have something to do with the current microsoft outlook EAS bug:
Outlook Desktop Exchange ActiveSync connections stopped working in Version 2401 - Microsoft Support
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/...Email-won-t-sync-with-Outlook-over-ActiveSync

I can't recommend the "Premium" Mail extension either, contact syncing issues etc...

 

[drdna]

@Elompenta this may have something to do with the current microsoft outlook EAS bug:
Outlook Desktop Exchange ActiveSync connections stopped working in Version 2401 - Microsoft Support
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/...Email-won-t-sync-with-Outlook-over-ActiveSync

I can't recommend the "Premium" Mail extension either, contact syncing issues etc...

Outlook Bug is fixed by Microsoft (new Outlook Update)