[Dovecot] [OT] preferred clients

Maarten Bezemer mcbdovecot at robuust.nl
Sun Nov 22 21:54:27 EET 2009


On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, vuser1 at test123.ru wrote:

> Outlook is best email client. Even 2003. The only missing thing is 
> inability to do imap-search request directly to imap server.

I won't say Outlook is the worst email client I've ever seen, but we all 
know that 'best' and 'Outlook' can only be in one sentence if it is 
accompanied by 'alternative to'...
Outlook 2007 is better than 2003, for example with non-ascii text. With 
2003, it's not possible to use a unicode pst for IMAP, so emails in (iirc) 
koi8-r are stored in the pst as all questionmarks. Forwarding them or 
saving them to another folder also forwards those changes to the IMAP 
server, effectively ruining the message. With Outlook 2007 things have 
improved, but it's still a mess.

> This FTS issue _may_be_ the problem in environment where users have not 
> primary workstation. And thanks to Jerry for pointing another issue - 
> problem if user logs in another workstation without logging out from 
> first.

Well, that part has been tackled by having the pst on a samba share: 
outlook simply won't open if you're still running it on another 
computer because then the PST is locked... To me, that sounds like a 
better solution than having multiple PSTs all with their own subset of the 
owner's emails.


> I tried to migrate to another clients several times. In the long run 
> Outlook is the best. Even for IMAP. It does not handle IMAP perfectly, 
> but quite well. It works OK with dovecot-imapd. If you are on Windows 
> and you have MSOffice, Outlook is the answer.

If you are on Windows, have MSOffice, don't need to administer lots of 
computers, and email in only one US-ASCII or ISO-LATIN1 supported 
language, then you might want to consider using Outlook. I've seen too 
many of my clients ordering me to install Outlook and then running in all 
kinds of trouble. Even as far as some changing to Squirrelmail because 
that at least enabled them to communicate with their colleagues in Russia 
etc. So Outlook is an answer only if you're prepared to face the 
consequences.


-- 
Maarten


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