Clint, My own commercial experience with Outlook supports Sam's theory. I disagree with his implicit assertion though: I *insist* that my email software cope with 18,000 messages in a folder, or even (double-checks) 160,000. You'll notice that I'm sending this message with Outlook, but that's because I'm at work, where Outlook is semi-compulsory.
In my last job I was also compelled to use Outlook, and in that job I would regularly receive a gigabyte of work-related critical personal mail per annum. This was not due to large attachments: I would typically get several hundred emails per day. In that job, I typically received 30,000 emails per annum, and I was required to maintain a single, searchable archive of the last five years email at any time. Outlook by itself (storing email in PST files) became unworkably slow after six months, and refused to store new messages after a year, causing them to bounce. It is noteworthy that a PST file containing only email, where that email weighed in at a gigabyte coming through our server, was itself just under two gigabytes. It takes more than a day on a very fast PC to perform a global search (effectively a grep) on such a file from Outlook. Exchange didn't seem to like this size of folder either. Search would hang Outlook on a folder with 80,000 messages in it, and Exchange's replication mechanism would crash sompletely when presented with a folder containing more than 50,000 or *anything*. "Enterprise class software" indeed. Outlook connected to a UW-IMAP server (Booo! Hiss!) was *slightly* better, but likewise painfully slow. Mozilla with its own native (mbox?) store was actually quite tolerable, provided you didn't want to (a) search or (b) delete anything, and searching could be achieved with grep and some patience, so we ended up effectively using that. I would have gotten to Courier eventually, at that point the company downsized for reasons unrelated to its email policies, and I found work somewhere more sensible. You will probably also find some of the following bugs (all catalogued on Microsoft's website, although I don't have the reference numbers here): - Outlook folder-view scrollbar will not scroll correctly when more than 10,000 messages are present in a single folder. - Outlook rules wizard will report an error when attempting to deliver to any folder containing more than 80,000 messages. - Outlook 'compact folder' tool for PST files does not finish when used on a folder from which more than 65535 messages have been deleted since the last compact. - Selecting a message in the folder view sometimes causes a different message to be selected or causes the view to scroll rapidly in either direction. This problem actually turns out to be present in Outlook 98 and 2000 all the time, it's just astronomically improbable in a folder with less than 10,000 messages in it. It gets worse as the number of messages increases. Don't get me wrong: I don't have a good alternative that I would unreservedly suggest, and I am not bagging Outlook blindly because I hate Microsoft. I have used this software in anger for most o my working life. I know it inside and out, and if you have this many messages in one place, Outlook will be a serious problem. _________________________________ Thorne Lawler Senior Systems Administrator t: +61 3 8329 2026 f: +61 3 9326 7588 e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Microlistics A Dawson Group Company www.microlistics.com.au _________________________________ > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Drew > Gibson > Sent: Wednesday, 21 April 2004 1:02 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [courier-users] Outlook weirdness > > > The poor dweebs in our office recently suffered the wrath of the Sales > Manager thanks to Outlook. > A quick google on "outlook 2gb limit" might be revealing. Microsoft > expects you to lose data when a mail box exceeds 2GB. > Could this be it? > > regards, > > Drew > > > Clint Byrum wrote: > > >Hi there. I have a very odd situation. I'm using Courier-IMAP v1.7.0, > >compiled from source on RedHat 8.0. Everything works great, except this > >weird situation we have with Outlook users and one account. > > > >We restored some emails from a backup into a user's Maildir under a > >subfoler of Inbox. So, they were originally files in Maildir/cur, and we > >restored them into Maildir/.Restored/cur. > > > >The user could see these emails fine, and after trimming what they > >didn't need, dragged the rest back into the Inbox. > > > >This is when it got ugly. After that point, any new email to the Inbox > >doesn't show up in Outlook. Not just this user's Outlook... ANY Outlook. > >I've tried Outlook 2000 and OutlookXP. I tried deleting the > >courierimapuiddb file. No dice. > > > >All of the email in the Inbox is visible from any other IMAP client I've > >tried (squirrelmail, Evolution, mutt, Mozilla), and indeed in mutt on > >the box looking directly at the Maildir. All mail in subfolders are > >still visible on Outlook. > > > >I know you guys aren't here to support Outlook, and quite frankly, I > >wish I never saw it again. But I'm hoping somebody out there has had a > >similar issue, or knows what might be wrong, and will see this. Things > >I've tried: > > > >-Deleted the account in Outlook and recreated. > >-Installed a fresh copy of Windows XP and Outlook2k. > >-Same, but with OutlookXP > > > >Also as a side note, this Inbox contains 18,000 emails. > > > >Thanks very much > > > >-cb > > > > > > > >------------------------------------------------------- > >This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials > >Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of > >GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system > >administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click > >_______________________________________________ > >courier-users mailing list > >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users > > > > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials > Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of > GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system > administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click > _______________________________________________ > courier-users mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users > ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
