Re: [Dovecot] outlook 2007 very slow.

` Kui Zhang wrote:

Hello

I have a user with 2500+ sub folders. Total mailboxes size is around 6G. (mdbox, dovecot 2:2.0.14)

Syncing/Receiving appears to be slow, with outlook 2007. He does not want to switch to an alternative, due to various reasons.

Any one else having similar issue? Anything else I should do to narrow down the issue?

I can't speak for outlook 2007, but back in outlook 2000, as well as

outlook 2002, it spoke a broken dialect of IMAP that would cause it to hang if you enabled it to read multiple mailboxes at one time.

The only safe way I found to use it was to only let it use 1 connection at a time, and even then it wasn't impossible to cause to to fail.

Perhaps MS limited outlook to only 1 connection to IMAP servers -- when I spoke to the engineer, they said that really had IMAP support at the lowest level, as it allowed the use of non-MS servers and mail servers -- and they only wanted to support Exchange (in order to get sites to buy exchange!)...

The issue was reported broken in 2000, and they had not fixed it by

2002 (office XP), so I moved to thunderbird...

I missed a few-several features, but I didn't miss the slowness and

unreliability in everyday reading of email.

Another problem -- AFAIK, outlook is only 32bit.  My mom gets

harassed, constantly to move things out of her primary .pst file and into 'archives', (where she can't easily access them and they don't have to be indexed...) because, the internal format became more strained as it got larger. With 6G of folders, indexing those, your user might be hitting outlook memory problems (not running out, but 'thrashing')...

If possible, he might try unsubbing to older boxes on his main

account, and setup an alternate account to 'go into the archives'...that way syncing only with currently active folders should go much faster)...

Send him my condolences...

-l

Thanks KuiZ