Mail Issues, Clients Perspective!

I wonder why there's so few articles discussing email issues as in clients perspective. Usually what we discuss is about servers and protocols. You know what, I believe the most valuable thing and also the center of any kind of messaging system is the users, the people. Users are the ones that should take benefits of the system or otherwise the real victims would be the users. So, we should take it bottom-up from users to servers, shouldn't we?

My office uses Ms Outlook mostly/officially as mail clients. And as we all usually do, the email clients are treated as dashboard. We keep it open all the time, from the moment we take a seat until we leave office, Ms Outlook is sitting there. The pop up notification as emails came in is just nice.

Yes, that's why I use Ms Outlook in the center of my universe. Why not using it as the spot where all things happen, like putting gmail account in it, also hotmail. Yes hotmail's Outlook Connector is a nice little thing that makes our universe centered in our desktop, the Ms Outlook to be precise. O, yea, put in also your email accounts from your side job. Use Pop3 or IMAP4 connection, isn't that fine or what? Now you are ready to go.

But then you begin to feel it. The slowliness. Ms outlook or any kind of email client is supposed to be multithreaded, but in this case still you need to queue what you are doing. That's why you still see the mail in the outbox is still hanging in there, not knowing when it will get out from your outbox and really sent. In cases like this, I usually recommend my users to:

1. "Cancel server request" by right clicking the outlook icon in the system tray.

2. Click in the "send and receive" button.

3. Those two steps sometime solve the problem (the outgoing emails are gone and move to sent folder), but it is quite often it doesn't. If it doesn't solve it then..

4. Quit outlook (it will prompt you to click ok although there are emails in the outgoing folder) and then open outlook again. You need to wait a few seconds before starting MsOutlook again to give time for the previous Outlook process to stop.

It's very annoying when you are in the middle of something big and something intercepts only because some silly email is hanging in the outbox folder and don't want to leave from there. I dont have much data yet, but I am damn sure that's because queueing problems, usually happen with users that have many mail accounts. Let's dig deeper...

The issues might arise from:

1. Simply too many accounts, as a generic issue in email client. Frankly I doubt this theory, because it happens with outlook with only two accounts too. One exchange account and another is IMAP4 account.

2. Incompatibility between Mail Server and client. This could be it, non exchange accounts are usually hosted in Linux servers. However, this shouldn't be the cause since operating system should not have anything to do with the mail server's job, they should be independent. The mail system should only concerns with protocols, credentials, and DNS.

3. Ms Outlook has handicaps to handle IMAP4 or other than MAPI and RPC over HTTP. I have a stong feeling about this as the cause. Can anybody provide evidence to approve or disapprove it? I will really appreciate it.

4. Queueing or multithread problems with Ms Outlook to handle too many email accounts. Again, any evidence to prove or disapprove it would be very appreciated.

That's all folk. I am setting up a small lab consist of two exchange servers (front and back server topology), a linux server for an IMAP4 email server, and two desktop for email clients. I will back to you to report the findings.