All,
This is slightly OT, but I figure a bunch of folks running IMAP servers should have some strong opinions on the topic.
While working on a migration to Dovecot, I had the opportunity to move one account to a server running same. This is an in-house billing department box that 3-4 people share. In theory, this should work well - all the billing folks see the same email, save sent mail to the same place, have the same set of folders available, and concurrent access is no problem.
In practice, I'm finding most clients kind of suck.
They started with Outlook, and that did not work well. The list of problems is long.
They've been using Thunderbird for some time and I'm finding the following issues there:
-searches across 2GB+ of mail are painfully slow, since it's all server-side -while the inbox is checked regularly and automatically, other folders are not unless the user manually checks them. getting tbird to do this involves a fairly non-intuitive process, and there's also the issue of making sure everyone actually adds the folders they need to watch -the client does not deal well with large amounts of mail in general - some operations give no feedback, like expanding large sub-folders or doing large copy/move operations. this leads to the user quitting the app and starting the whole process again. dovecot deals with this more gracefully than the old server (Courier), but it's still an issue -offline operation would be handy sometimes, but tbird has no "hybrid" mode, and again, one must select every folder for offline access
As much as people like to bash it, OS-X mail.app is basically what I'm looking for. It addresses all the shortcomings in Tbird. If I tell it to make messages available offline, it does that for all boxes. It always checks all my boxes, and when a search is performed it searches on the local copy rather than the server (which is quite polite, IMHO). It works quite well with no internet connection as well. I have about 50,000 messages in it now across 5 accounts and it only rarely gets laggy on me. I want this client on Windows, basically. :)
I'm installing Mulberry now, but the manual seems to indicate it also will rely on the server-side search unless it's in offline mode (which has to be toggled - not a good solution).
I must say, Dovecot has impressed the hell out of me. I had a chance to deal with the same mailbox in courier and dovecot, and everything is much faster, especially in mail.app and roundcube. Insanely fast...
What else is out there for windows clients?
Thanks,
Charles
Charles Sprickman NetEng/SysAdmin Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net spork@bway.net - 212.655.9344