Strange behavior on search

[jonathanv81]

Hi,


I've recently begun working as IT/network administrator for a small business who's using Zimbra CS for their e-mail needs.

Now one of the users, the one who's using the mail most I would say, has been complaining for some days that the search doesn't work properly in Outlook. He's using mostly Outlook with the ZCO but occasionally uses the web interface if he has problems with Outlook or works outside the company.

So the problem is whenever he makes a search (Find/Search button) in Outlook, the results come up and some of them (seemingly random) get selected (marked with blue background).
And as he has quite a lot of mail (well kind of, like 2gb) and all of it in his inbox folder and some searches get so many results that the messages list will begin blinking with messages being selected and the search will slow down a lot.

Well I have been doing some tests and have seen the same behavior (messages getting selected without reason) on another computer with another account (also above 2gb) with the same setup (ZCS 5.08, ZCO 5.08/5.11, Win XP, Outlook 2003 SP3 although the rest of the programs are not the same) and could only fix it by upgrading Outlook to the 2007 version.

So I thought I would ask here, see if anybody had the same problem or could figure out what happens since I couldn't find anything anywhere else on the internet. Is that a bug of Outlook 2003 or could it be a problem with the ZCO?
And also: is Outlook search so bad (2003 or 2007) that if you search for several short words it will get any message that has any of those letters combinations in it?

Should I consider maybe changing to Thunderbird with Zindus? Is Thunderbird search better? Will I get all the contacts, calendars, etc synched just like with the ZCO? Has anybody experience changing their users from one to the other maybe?


Well those are a lot of questions, I hope you guys can give me some advice.
Thank you very much for any help.


Jon

[Jbrabander]

Have you given any thought about having them switch over and just use the webmail interface?

[jonathanv81]

Originally Posted by Jbrabander

Have you given any thought about having them switch over and just use the webmail interface?

Actually I think a majority of users here use the web interface and although it's a very good interface compared to most other webmails, I think it still lacks the comfort of use of a real mail client in certain areas, to attach documents for example (sending the file from Windows or from another program like a PDF converter) so I was actually thinking of switching them all to Outlook.

Also that user has a laptop that he carries during his travels and he wants to be able to download his messages whenever he can get an internet connection to read them even when he cannot get one (Internet is not available everywhere just yet).

For now I installed LookOut which is a search add-in for Outlook which doesn't give the problems Outlook search is giving me but I would like a real solution for Outlook.
I also realized while searching in the forums that you can't even use Windows Search with the ZCO so Vista/Outlook 2007 integrated search/indexing is also not compatible with Zimbra which is not great.

[Jbrabander]

You might want to take a look at the Zimbra desktop program for your traveler. It stores everything locally so you can read mail while you're offline.

I'm not sure why your Outlook search isn't working though. I haven't ever seen that one. Do people with smaller mailboxes have the same issue?

[thomas wyse]

I have a user who is experiencing the same issue with a 33mb mailbox. Outlook 2007 and was not experiencing this before switching to Zimbra/ZCO.

Any ideas yet? Will be looking to open a bug report if no fix is known.

[gnyce]

I had thought that the Windows Search add-on was required when using Outlook... in other words, the ZCO did not give you access to Zimbra's search facility (or search indicies), so you indexed your local mail/ZDB using the Windows Desktop Search

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...h/default.mspx

[thomas wyse]

Can anyone explain how Outlook's search function differs when using the ZCO? It strikes me as odd that Zimbra would overpower the application's native ability to effectively search messages.