[Dovecot] windows imap clients

[Charles Sprickman]

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 at bway.net - 212.655.9344