QuickBooks and non-Outlook email

Well, our office is moving away from Outlook since it does not work well in a self-hosted mail server environment. Our security and privacy policies make using a public Web Mail client not possible.

In fact, this seems to be a rather silly restriction. Do all businesses who are QB customers really only use Outlook or gmail/yahoo for email? My smart phone can connect to our server! What's up with Quickbooks? All that's needed is an ID, password, server and port. Seems like QB has been over-engineered in this area and results in the elimination of lots of mail servers. Do more recent versions of QB fix this?

If there is no solution to this problem on the QuickBooks end, our solution will be to use something other than Quickbooks.

You may wish to work at Outlook a bit. I have Outlook (from 2010 to 2016) at all my clients (all small business) and it works well.

Otherwise, I am not sure how to help.

John Hurst:

I have Outlook (from 2010 to 2016) at all my clients (all small business) and it works well.

What server are you using?

Exchange 2013 hosted and Microsoft 365 hosted. Was in-house Exchange 2007 a few years ago.

We are not going to "cloud" outlook365 or outlook.com. I assume you are running Exchange on Server 2012? We used to run Exchange just fine on SBS 2008. We went to upgrade that but found that Microsoft had dropped the SBS product (too bad) and its replacement, Server Essentials, did not support exchange. Our only MS options were to go with MS Server or go to a cloud version of Exchange.

We decided not to go with the more complex Server product and hosted the email on an in-house IMAP server. For the most part, it works without users knowing any better. However without Exchange some of Outlooks features are short-sheeted, most of which I've been able to recover or work around.

Furthermore, Outlook 2013 (and presumably 2016) do not work well with an in-house IMAP server. I've posted numerous issues on this site about that. See the tail end of https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28714556/Send-Spreadsheet-Document-from-Word-Excel-2013-no-message-body.html for a summary. We down-graded back to 2010.

This Quickbooks thing is the first real road-block we've hit, having nothing to do with Outlook directly except that QB only supports a limited number of email services.

We've made the decision not to go with Server 2012 internally or outlook365 or outlook.com externally, which means our future is limited with Outlook. So, no sense in us "working at Outlook a bit." There are other accounting programs.

I have had Outlook and QuickBooks running at clients for 15 years, ranging from POP (web based) email years ago, to in-house Exchange, to Hosted Exchange (not Microsoft), to Microsoft Exchange from Outlook 2002 to Outlook 2013 today with a smattering of Outlook 2016 (still new).

We just do not have the problems you point to.

So I will have to leave you with a non-Outlook, non-QuickBooks environment. I support what my clients want, but I have no objection to other applications either.

We've gotten a bit off topic from how to get non-Outlook/non-Gmail mail servers to work with QuickBook, but as long as we've done so, your comments make me curious ...

We too used SBS and Exchange for 15 years or so, but what are your clients using for mail servers TODAY? Legacy SBS and in-house Exchange? In-house Server 2012 with Exchange? Or are your clients mostly using outlook.com and no longer hosting mail servers in-house? If still in-house, what are they using?

How did you solve the problem with Outlook 2013 and the Live ID registration requirement -- did every user get registered with a unique ID? Did you use a client-wide ID? Did you not have re-registration issues when a user "roamed" to a different workstation, or do your clients not do that? How do you handle an employee leaving and the workstation getting reassigned to a different user? Do you re-register Office with a different live ID? Just continue using the former employee's ID?

When I posted these problems last summer no one was able to give me much advice on solving them. With Microsoft dropping the SBS product and not supporting Exchange on Server Essentials, it seemed clear to me that MS wanted to eventually herd everyone to the cloud. We had to make some choices.

what are your clients using for mail servers TODAY

1. Hosted Exchange (not Microsoft) and always up to date. As far as I know, Server 2012 / Exchange 2013. They service many thousands of Outlook clients.

2. Microsoft 365 Exchange  - my guess is up-to-date.

How did you solve the problem with Outlook 2013 and the Live ID registration requirement

Outlook using RPC/HTTPS.

Did you not have re-registration issues when a user "roamed" to a different workstation,

No.

Well, there's where I'm a bit stuck. You say your clients use "Hosted Exchange" which I assume from your reply is not self-hosted, and "Microsoft 365 Exchange". We are not authorized for 3rd party email hosting. When I first discussed this in EE in 2014, another recommendation was staging Exchange on Server 20xx, or use a virtual machine with Server Essentials and Server 20xx with Exchange on the Server 20xx virtual host https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28449872/Windows-SBS-versus-Windows-Server-Essentials.html. As one poster in that question said, "Microsoft's answer [for] the small business is the cloud."

With the cloud or 3rd party Exchange hosting not an option for us, we felt there were simpler alternatives to the various suggested Server 20xx/Exchange scenarios, including self-host IMAP. As I said, this has worked out pretty well using Outlook 2010, but it seems that Outlook 2013 and above pretty much need Exchange to avoid those Live Id and roaming workstation problems I mentioned. You haven't seen these because your clients are sticking with Exchange and aren't restricted to in-house hosting.

You probably need to find a different solution. Outlook at clients is via Exchange in some form. We do not use "live" accounts and roam around with them. So I really cannot help beyond what I have offered.

But -- having said all that. Our only real problem with mail is that QuickBooks restricts mail server access to using Outlook (presumably as a client), or webmail having the full email address as the login Id. QB apparently does not do plain 'old smtp authentication with id/password. All other program running on this workstation, including Excel and Word, have no problem using whatever the configured mail client is. QuickBooks, it seems, only supports the Outlook client and only supports SMTP connections to gmail, yahoo and hotmail.

Our mail server is running Sendmail. When QB is trying to connect, I get the following message from Sendmail:

Feb  5 12:45:22 mail sm-mta[1982]: u15HhrrI001982: COMMON.hprs.local [192.168.0.58] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to MTA

So, anyone out there who know of a solution or work-around to this for QuickBooks, please share.

This problem was resolved by upgrading QuickBooks. The newer version supports Thunderbird just fine.

Thanks for the update.