[Dovecot] outlook 2007 very slow.

[Kui Zhang]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Linda Walsh <dovecot at tlinx.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> ` 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!)...
>

I thought it might have been something anti-competitive...

We decided to give outlook 2k10 a try. Everything appears to work so
far. It seems to be using only 1 connection... 2k7 was using 5
connections, with multiple connections in idle state(adding inotify
watches)

>   The issue was reported broken in 2000, and they had not fixed it by
> 2002 (office XP), so I moved to thunderbird...
>

thunderbird does not really work for us, due to amount of emails per
mailbox. It was hogging all the memory + cpu.

Trying out claw-mail. It is working really well.


>   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
>>
>