More Microsoft Woes: IMAP

More hassles courtesy of Microsoft:

They can take standards compliance to new lows;

my experience with IMAP and MS Outlook was not surprising, but still frustrating enough to write this Blog Post.

I used the following links to [hopefully] resolve errors that one of my clients kept getting in Microsoft Outlook:

• http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2496
• http://osdir.com/ml/mail.imap.courier.server/2006-06/msg00007.html
• http://osdir.com/ml/mail.qmail.ldap/2005-05/msg00005.html

Basically, Microsoft Outlook (and Outlook Express as well, from what I read) do not implement IMAP protocol as per the specification. I believe the IMAP4 protocol is superior to POP3 - greater functionality allows for better access and management of email. The problem is that the mentioned Microsoft email clients have a tendency to pop-up timeout errors repeatedly, even though everything is fine [aside from Microsoft's implementation of IMAP].

I had to modify the configuration of my mail-server (courier on CentOS Linux), which now allows for more concurrent connections from the same IP address. Doing so partially defeats the purpose of IMAP (long-term persistent connections), which saves the overhead of repeat connections & authentications (i.e. one of POP3's many disadvantages). Unfortunately, Microsoft sometimes takes a good thing and contaminates/compromises it, and does so without rectifying it.

I hope this Blog Post encourages people to dump their Microsoft email software. Novell Evolution provides the best features of Outlook, while maintaining standards compliance, higher security, higher performance, and progressive updates/development. I spent the time to write this Blog Post because other great people around the world finally made Evolution on Win32, so you can run it on Windows XP!

Here's to Microsoft playing friendly or getting left behind,
Shak