One of the things I found interesting is one of the popular Free Mailclients, Mozilla Thunderbird, has made me wonder how 'good' it is. And to be honest... I find it short on some things.
Now I know many hate Microsoft. I will also admit, I'm sort of a Microsoft user, with Windows and all, but I do have to harp that Windows' problems stem mostly from bad programming, not well thought out issues (Which is par for the course for any program rushed out.) and just plain Borg of Microsoft assimilation of various things and ideas.
One thing I have to say about how Outlook handles mail, though, it has its good points and bad points.
One of the annoying bad points is how it handles IMAP servers. I have noticed with some IMAP servers, it tends to have some issues on updating IMAP flags at times or in cases of very large mailboxes, the lag time it takes for it to deal with mail. That and the fact that it wants to cache mail, so large mailboxes... Be prepared to watch your system crawl at times while Outlook tries to sync large number of messages for the first time. (Trust me... It's like watching paint dry.)
Thunderbird isn't necessarily as bad, but it does have an annoying bad habit with archiving. Such as... Its concept of archiving... You pull down e-mail from the server, and save it in some file on your computer. Unless you took the time to specify where your 'Local Folders' are... You will be hard pressed to know where they are if you want to save them somewhere else. And what more, the fun thing about it is, you won't be able to make reasonable organized file folders, cause each folder is considered a 'file' and if you have 'subfolders' those create a folder of the main folder and files for the folders containing messages.
What more, if you want to bounce between mail clients, IE: You want to take mail you archive from Outlook or from Thunderbird... Your options from outlook to thunderbird are lots. Thunderbird to Outlook - Practically trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Now, where I work, my section will be moving to another group's Exchange server, mostly because this other group will take over the IT position at my section. That's great, I wanted to move people to use an Exchange server for a few reasons. Only one problem... Majority of the users are on Thunderbird with YEARS worth of data in their Local Folder.
Well, doing a little research, and the fact that we were doing mail through an IMAP server, the solution to switch from Thunderbird to Outlook had to be looked into. What I found funny was the group who we were joining to, their research into it was a little behind. I did this research a little before I found out about this change, mostly because on of the division's heads was getting tired of how Thunderbird handled her archiving, usually resulting instability because of slow reaction with the IMAP server and her getting impatient due to it seeming like it froze up.
My solution was taking the mail from the Thunderbird client and uploading it to an IMAP server, in my case, I had to upload it to another one since our mail IMAP server has limits and years worth of data can sometimes be in the gigabyte range.
Well, I can tell you, free IMAP servers you put on some piddly desktop machine with some SQL server on it... Painfully slow, especially pulling back down on Outlook. Never want to do it again, especially with large data.
What I found interesting, was how the other group wanted to import this stuff. Similar idea, but strangely enough, wanted to also go through a Macintosh Mail Client, which made no sense to me. Of course, they also claimed they never worked with Thunderbird. So I told them, from my experience with Thunderbird, and with Exchange... Exchange has IMAP capability. While I lacked the ability to setup my own Exchange server to test the idea out, I felt that having Thunderbird making a connection to the Exchange Server via IMAP, is more likely to be faster than trying to do it some other way.
And given the fact we were planning on going to Outlook and on an Exchange server, wouldn't it be more prudent to have the users push their email archive first onto Exchange and then bring it back down on Outlook's PST folders, especially lacking any nice tool to do thunderbird to outlook pst conversions.
That idea is getting adopted for the transition, which is cool. Of course, now Mozilla just needs to be willing to allow their users to archive off mail in a different way, one that is a bit more user friendly.
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