Thanks.
I'm a software developer by nature, but I'm pretty good at networking stuff, too, being something of a 90's teenage linux guru, so it comes naturally for me to script everything I can. Plus when it comes to homework, I'm one to always RTFM. Or RTFW(iki). Or RTFF(orum), heh.
I really wish I could go the "tough love" route to the web client right away without porting their mail, but there's some resistance preventing that. For going to the web client alone, there'd have to be retraining, and some people generally don't find it as smooth and as well-featured as desktop mail apps, even though it has some godly AJAX/SOAP/etc capabilities.
After all, I showed the PO approval stuff to my brother, who used to work for Depot America, and he said it'd save them a fortune in time and accuracy if they didn't have to copy and paste stuff like that out of e-mails constantly into their CRM app. Some consultant/contractor could probably make some megabucks pitching this software to such places, especially with the management-pleasing commercial support and capabilities available for something like a nickel per seat per day.
But BTTT, this company still has a number of low-end machines that just barely cut it for their requirements of XP -- 256MB RAM P3-450's, Celery 600's, etc that didn't fare entirely too well against the heavy (but f--ing amazing) AJAX of the web client. Those boxes are pokey enough running Thunderbird and all its RAM-for-speed tradeoffs, even, as long as they're not chunking in the swap.
Still, I'm going to try the web interface on some of the home/mostly-offsite users. I told them I don't do housecalls.
They also wanted it somewhat transparent, meaning ideally they'd get back to their workstations with the same mail client and the same mail, just being able to access it anywhere from now. Training them on all these features, no matter how cool they are, was outside the scope of my current project, but the thing I love about Zimbra is that you can meet your basic needs, but have an awesome backend for it and plenty of potential for the future.
And I probably wouldn't be caught dead dealing with Outlook's crap for a project like this, and fortunately they didn't either back in the day, especially with all the worms running through it -- thankfully, they had foresight to move to Mozilla and eventually Thunderbird on some of the more-recently setup boxes, after they moved off of Eudora.
The only difference I knew even from the start was reconfiguring their mail clients for IMAP, which even with zimbra, is mostly taken care of by walking station to station and just running \\server\folder\zwizard.bat. Thank God that mozilla's cool enough that you can just script a prefs.
js file into a directory and have that do all the work.
And I totally hear you about junk files. I saw mailboxes that were 1-2GB in size, since e-mail seems to be the poor man's file transfer protocol in most cases -- after a few years, it can really add up. Especially when they leave the spam there. Fortunately, most of them were compliant in cleaning them out, as they're really nice people, and I provided good instructions on how to do so, though it took about two weeks of nagging.
You can reduce the sizes of an Inbox pretty significantly namely sorting by size and deleting them, especially in the Sent box that no one ever cleans out. Plus some don't have any qualms about hitting Ctrl-A and hitting delete on their mailboxes as I suggested -- I left it to their discretion to do so.
Still, it's going to be hell to port that stuff over. I'm crossing my fingers on it a bit.
Thanks for the advice, though, it's much appreciated. I'm glad someone else had to go through as bad, if not worse, of a mail overhaul than I will. I was getting a little shaky reading nothing but nearly one-command imapsync stories.
And again, thanks Zimbra guys, if you're reading this! Your product's a killer app on so many levels. It's going to be a boon to the open source business sector, especially the kind where contractors set up rock-solid, low-maintenance, low-expense servers for real-world mid-sized/small companies that just want some box to run in the background that if it happens to break, they can just make a call, kind of like how supermarkets and stores do. Just going basic with it and giving those businesses Exchange-like capabilities on the cheap is a goldmine not only for the contractors, but for them as well. Not to mention the non-profit sector, which has zero budget for such things but could really use it. And, as mentioned, there's tons of potential for the big guys to go commericial with this.
-Peter