how does Outlook 2003/2007 IMAP behave with Zimbra?

[carboncow]

Outlook is known to have time out and IMAP issues with other mail servers. I'm not a tech on the coding level but I've read it has to do with MS Outlook not conforming to some IMAP standards correctly.

One of the reasons we are considering looking at Zimbra (open source) is that the few users who have to have Outlook are having to many errors with our hmailserver and I want to know if other users having and time-out or sync issues with their IMAP folder structure with Zimbra...

Thanks.

[YetiRick]

The Outlook users that I have at one site see no functional difference between Zimbra and the Cyrus IMAP server it replaced. Outlook's IMAP support is still terrible, and users still hate having to purge deleted emails rather than just having them disappear when they hit the delete button. However, even on the ancient, slow hardware on which Cyrus was running, I never really had timeout or sync issues. (Other than those caused by users trying to fully sync for offline use a huge, multi-gigabyte folder across a ridiculously slow link. But, sadly, I can't blame that problem on Outlook.) All of the problems I had could be directly attributed to the fact that Outlook was designed to work with Exchange Server and has generally poor support for actual Internet email protocols.

A different site I administer uses Outlook exclusively for their mail client and has gone from dovecot to Open-Xchange to Zimbra with pretty much the same complaints throughout. The bottom line seems to be that if one wishes for Outlook to play nice with their email it is best used with Exchange Server. Which is probably the point to many of Microsoft's design decisions.