[Dovecot] windows imap clients
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
On Sep 21, 2009, at 7:07 AM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
-searches across 2GB+ of mail are painfully slow, since it's all
server-side
You could improve this with http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS
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On 2009-09-21 14:21, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Sep 21, 2009, at 7:07 AM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
-searches across 2GB+ of mail are painfully slow, since it's all server-side
You could improve this with http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS
... but note that FTS creates one index per mailbox (=folder), so with a huge amount of folders (which seems to be the case in your setup), it won't help you much.
Timo, wasn't there a way to get around this limitation via virtual folders?
Patrick.
STAR Software (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. http://www.star-group.net/ Phone: +86 (21) 3462 7688 x 826 Fax: +86 (21) 3462 7779
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On Sep 21, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Patrick Nagel wrote:
On 2009-09-21 14:21, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Sep 21, 2009, at 7:07 AM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
-searches across 2GB+ of mail are painfully slow, since it's all server-side
You could improve this with http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS
... but note that FTS creates one index per mailbox (=folder), so
with a huge amount of folders (which seems to be the case in your setup), it
won't help you much.
With Squat, yes. With Solr everything is in the same index.
Timo, wasn't there a way to get around this limitation via virtual
folders?
I think with a virtual mailbox containing "all mailboxes" Squat also
creates a single index for it. Solr is also optimized for virtual
mailboxes, it won't even duplicate indexes for them.
I'm not very happy with Squat in general. The index updating speed is
way too slow. Needs a redesign some day.. Nowadays Cyrus can also do
incremental Squat indexing, I guess I should see how they're doing
it. :)
On 21.09.2009 8:07, Charles Sprickman wrote:
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
TB3 does solve this problem with gloda, which index everything locally.
-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
TB3 by default doing this if I not mistaken. (I've changed lot things in my config when was on 2.0)
-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. Activity manager in TB3 should help.
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
TB3 have offline mode enabled by default. What is hybrid mode?
On 9/21/2009, Nikolay Shopik (shopik@inblock.ru) wrote:
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
TB3 have offline mode enabled by default.
I hate this (because I have a LOT of mail and do NOT want to have to wait for hours for it all to download the first time I set up my account on a new PC), and have opened a Feature Request to NOT have this be the new default when TB3 ships:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508276
Basically:
If an upgrade is performed, TB3 should honor the current offline settings - ie, if certain Accounts are set to full offline mode, TB3 should also set that account to full offline mode - but should also default to the new 'On Demand' mode, which may be the 'Hybrid' mode you mentioned.
If it is a new/clean install, the default should be 'On Demand', which means, messages are downloaded for offline use, but only when clicked on/selected.
Any folder can be set to full offline mode, and all others are set to 'On-Demand' by default.
It appears the Devs have accepted this FR as 'will be done', but not sure about #3 (if these settings can be set on a perf older basis)... I sure hope they can, because I do have a few folders I really would like full offline mode for, but most I do not...
--
Best regards,
Charles
On 9/21/2009, Charles Marcus (CMarcus@Media-Brokers.com) wrote:
I hate this (because I have a LOT of mail and do NOT want to have to wait for hours for it all to download the first time I set up my account on a new PC),
I should have also mentioned, Sync On Demand is already possible with the TB3 builds, but it isn't obvious:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482476#c21
--
Best regards,
Charles
On 9/21/2009, Charles Sprickman (spork@bway.net) wrote:
They've been using Thunderbird for some time and I'm finding the following issues there:
I highly recommend you try the new Thunderbird 3 builds (current is b3 I believe)...
It has mucho, much IMAP improvements, too many to go into...
--
Best regards,
Charles
On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, Charles Marcus wrote:
On 9/21/2009, Charles Sprickman (spork@bway.net) wrote:
They've been using Thunderbird for some time and I'm finding the following issues there:
I highly recommend you try the new Thunderbird 3 builds (current is b3 I believe)...
It has mucho, much IMAP improvements, too many to go into...
Charles (and Nikolay), thanks very much for pointing me at the TB3 beta.
I installed this on my machine and did some testing and then rolled it out for the billing folks. For the most part it works pretty well. It does now default to storing everything offline. Full-text searching across all boxes is more than fast enough (not as fast as mail.app + spotlight, but good enough).
The only gotchas I found were:
-still no good indicator of the status when it's syncing things up - you can pull up an "activity monitor" under the "tools" menu, but the bottom status line seems to sometimes show the activity, sometimes not. I could find no rhyme or reason to this. The hard drive activity light was the best indicator of an indexing or syncing operation.
-they go and take up a good deal of the toolbar for a nice little search box, but offer no option to look anywhere but the selected mailbox within this UI element. Bizarre. To do searches across multiple boxes you have to right-click the account name in the left pane and a new window pops up for search criteria AND results.
-A few times I had to manually help the syncing process on the main inbox by manually reindexing, quitting and restarting TB. It would hang at 20-30 messages in for no apparent reason.
Overall, a huge step up from TB2. They seem happy with it so far.
Also all this syncing was a nice workout for Dovecot. It performed admirably when I had two machines with 3 different XP users all syncing the same account. Bottleneck seemed to be the client, which is good (for Timo).
Thanks,
Charles
--
Best regards,
Charles
On 9/23/2009, Charles Sprickman (spork@bway.net) wrote:
Charles (and Nikolay), thanks very much for pointing me at the TB3 beta.
And of course, they just released b4...
I didnt check the changelog to see if any of your issues were addressed, but I certainly hope - since you are apparently going to continue using it - that you will help them fix these problems by updating to b4, and reporting any issues that still exist to bugzilla:
--
Best regards,
Charles
On Wed, 23 Sep 2009, Charles Marcus wrote:
On 9/23/2009, Charles Sprickman (spork@bway.net) wrote:
Charles (and Nikolay), thanks very much for pointing me at the TB3 beta.
And of course, they just released b4...
Literally the day after I upgraded to b3. :)
I didnt check the changelog to see if any of your issues were addressed, but I certainly hope - since you are apparently going to continue using it - that you will help them fix these problems by updating to b4, and reporting any issues that still exist to bugzilla:
Well, b3 took care of the offline access and the basic "search locally rather than server-side" issues quite well. b4 is like someone read my mind - the search field in the toolbar now can search everything, and the results are presented in a new tab. Nice layout - filters in the left pane to narrow the search, list of results in the right pane.
3.0 is really looking to be a nice release...
Charles
I'll report anything I can find/reproduce.
--
Best regards,
Charles
participants (5)
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Charles Marcus
-
Charles Sprickman
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Nikolay Shopik
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Patrick Nagel
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Timo Sirainen