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IMAP, Thunderbird, and mail clients

  • Articolo

For much of my career at Microsoft I’ve owned mail related features. I pretty much designed all the IMAP support in Entourage with Mike Fullerton and Steve Friesen and I’m pretty happy with how it works. IMAP itself is a complex protocol to implement properly (it’s been redone about 3 times now). Each server has its own little nuances, but generally, I love the concept because everything is stored on the server.  I can check my mail from multiple computers and use web mail w/o needing my own personal Exchange account.

However, there are some frustrating things about IMAP such as the delete model. With IMAP when you delete a message, it’s simply marked for deletion. It’s just a flag. In many clients the message remains, and the client must purge the mailbox to get rid of it (purging the mailbox removes all messages marked for deletion).

In Entourage, we offer a delete model (on by default) that behaves like a local mail client (or Exchange). Messages are copied to the deleted items folder, marked for deletion, and the mailbox is purged. However, this is a lot of work for a simple delete. There is no IMAP MOVE command, only COPY. To make matters worse, when you COPY a message on many IMAP servers, you don’t know what the message UID (Unique ID) is in that new folder. This makes it very difficult to support actions such as Undo, or any complex message tracking like we do in Entourage. A way around this is to search the destination mailbox for the message and get the UID. Luckily Exchange now returns the UID by supporting some newer IMAP extensions (UID Plus).

For me, the main features I want in an IMAP client are the following:

  • Support for IDLE (clients don’t need to poll for new mail, they are notified when a new message arrives)
  • Delete messages by copying the message to the deleted items folder, marking the message deleted, and purging the mailbox so that the deleted message goes away.
  • Store Sent mail & Drafts in the Server Sent Items & Drafts folder.
  • Use internet style attributions (Outlook places all replies on the top of the message, ever other mail client allows you to insert the reply either interspersed or at the bottom).
  • Support for Format-Flowed.

 

To understand what Internet style attributions are about, and why Format-Flowed is a nice feature take a look at this pic from a plain text message that I’ve replied to 3 times in Outlook (the same thing would happen in Entourage, OE and a few other products).

Below is a screen shot of Thunderbird and what Internet Style attributions look like, as well as Format Flowed support (where text is wrapped properly). As you grow and shrink the window, the quoted text is dynamically re-flowed as it would be in a web browser. This is much better than the 72 or so character line breaks that can get to be a mess and you end up with text like so:

IMAP Server

So, the mail features I want in an IMAP server are:

  • Server side rules (all mail is directed to folders on the server).
  • Server side spam filtering
  • Backups.
  • Web based interface

I’ve been looking for a decent Windows IMAP Client for the past few years with little success. Luckily I have a great IMAP Server provider, Fastmail. They provide all the features above, and run a decent IMAP server.  I’ve been using them for almost 2 years now.

IMAP Clients

Client wise here is a run down on what I’ve tried (yes, this is by no means scientific, unbiased etc; it’s just based on my experience as a user with these products):

Executive Summary: Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you.

  • Outlook : Needs improvment 
    1. Does not support the exchange like delete model I reference above
    2. Does not store sent mail on the IMAP server, but your Exchange server or local folder is you don’t have an exchange server
    3. Message must manually be purged for each folder
    4. No internet style attribution.
    5. No IDLE support (at least I don’t think so) Larry Osterman informed me that Outlook does support IDLE. Thanks Larry.
    6. Hard to find messages easily (and no server side IMAP search). Thankfully, MSN Search Toolbar and a number of products like X1, Lookout, etc fill this void very nicely. MSN Search being my favorite.
    7. One of the best Junk Mail Filters (same technology we use at Hotmail)
  • Windows Outlook Express : Needs improvement
    1. Fast as heck
    2. Purges message when you switch from folder to folder, which is better than outlook.
    3. No internet style attribution.
    4. No IDLE support (at least I don’t think so) Larry Osterman informed me that OE does support IDLE. Thanks Larry.
    5. Poor Offline support.
    6. Hard to find messages easily (and no server side IMAP search). Thankfully, MSN Search Toolbar supports this.
  • Windows Eudora : Not acceptable 
    1. Slow as molasses
    2. Frequently corrupts local IMAP folders
    3. Horrible interface
    4. Funky IMAP support.
  • Entourage : Excellent
    1. I helped to design most of the IMAP support, so there is nothing wrong with it (hehe). Well nothing that I’m unhappy about.
  • Thunderbird : Good
    1. Fast
    2. Supports the delete model I like
    3. Junk Mail filter
    4. Internet style attribution
    5. Supports IDLE (turns out at the time that I wrote this post, Thunderbird did not support IDLE. However, this was recently added)!
    6. Easy to find messages and supports server side IMAP search!!!!
    7. Doesn’t support getting unread counts for all folders w/o manually tweaking the application preferences.
    8. Supports mailbox quota

Update: I updated this post to reflect some corrections, edits and changes.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2004
    I use Pine (http://www.washington.edu/pine/) as
    my test client for my imap server (since UW defined
    the IMAP protocol I figured if it works with PINE it conforms to the spec).
  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2004
    Entourage would be even more perfect if it had Format=Flowed...
  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2004
    ... erklrt uns Omar Shahine von und jetzt haltet euch fest: Microsoft. Seit die ihre Blogs haben, gefalle
  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2004
    Take a look at what LumiSoft has to offer:
    http://www.lumisoft.ee/lsWWW/ENG/Products/Mail_Server/mail_index_eng.aspx?type=info
    It gives you a mailserver implemented in C#, complete with source code.
    I've altered the deletion in IMAP to purge automatically, and to update when mail comes in.
  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2004
    OE supports IDLE, I put IDLE into the Exchange IMAP server and Raymond implemented it in the client :)
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    Thanks for the info Larry! I thought OE had IDLE support but I wasn't sure.
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    Outlook also supports IDLE (I was the tester on it years ago).

    And, I know this isn't a great answer, but it's possible to write an addin to Outlook that provides server-side drafts/sent items as well as the exchange-style deletion model.

    I actually have some (absolutely wretched) code to do the deletion model that I wrote up for a customer a few years ago. It also adds a button to purge deleted in all folders.

    Outlook's object model is pretty powerful to add customizations to make it behave the way you want.
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    I tried to write an add-in once to handle the internet style replies but I gave up. I just can't handle using the Office Macro editor and VB...

    I have a button now that purges messages in that folder (it's just the menu command from the Edit menu) but I really don't want to have to press it all the time.
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    What version of Eudora did you use? Is the new version 6 just as bad as far as IMAP?
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    Two points:

    1) Thunderbird doesn't yet support IDLE. There's a bug open (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141369) to support it. Hopefully it'll come to fruition soon.

    2) There's a great tool for OE called OE-Quotefix (http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/) which does a great job of making the viewing and editing of messages work like a real, responsible mail client. It was my saving grace in my pre-Thunderbird days.
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    How to do backup in Mozilla Thunderbird:
    http://gemal.dk/archives/000461.html

    and how to restore:
    http://gemal.dk/archives/000463.html
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    OE for Windows actually has pretty good offline support. You can do most anything offline that you can do online, and all actions are synced to the server next time you connect.

    An IMAP program to definitely check out for Windows is Mulberry (http://www.cyrusoft.com) - it doesn't have to download everything locally, handling server-side searches, sorting, etc. So it's super-fast for big mailboxes.

    BTW Omar, if there's anything we at FastMail.FM can do to work better with Entourage, feel free to let me know (you can use this form: http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/member.php?s=&action=mailform&userid=1074 )
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    Henrik Gemal has written up a clever tutorial on how to backup IMAP mail using Mozilla Thunderbird. Follow that up with the corresponding tutorial on restoring IMAP emails. Now those of you who're still using POP3 to get your email...
  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Well, whaddaya know
  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Rod, thanks for the correction. I could have swore that Thunderbird did IDLE. I guess it's the automatic mail check that I've assumed was IDLE ;-).

    Well, I hope they add this soon. IDLE is a hard feature to impliment correctly.
  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    In Thunderbird you can select which folders to check for new messages. Open the folder properties (right-click a folder and select properties, or select Folder properties from the Edit menu) and check "Check this folder for new messages".

    Ere
  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Btw, I believe Thunderbird 0.5 contains an improvement in checking other folders for new messages. The folders are no longer selected and headers synchronized, but the IMAP status command is used, which makes the check a lot faster and more unobtrusive.
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    I recently switched from MSOE to TBird and I'm quite happy. Big improvement. My only complaint is the 'send' model: in MSOE I could put messages in the Outbox and then send them all later. I've noticed that there are TBird extensions that do this so I'll give one of them a try.
  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2004
    I also just recently discovered Mozilla Thunderbird and I can only say: Wow! It truly has excellent support for mail standards and on top of it has an awsome anti-spam filter. Quick search feature is also a must once you try it. I highly recommend this browser.
  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2004
    Thunderbird and Fastmail.fm, my favourite combo also! IDLE support in Thunderbird would be great. Perhaps in time for 1.0?
  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2004
  1. Outlook is so limiting because you can't run multiple instances of it. Often it's great to run a few copies of PC-Pine or multiple Thunderbird views.

    2. I would rank Mulberry an A+, above the rest, as an IMAP client. However, no HTML support is becoming a serious drag.

    3. On slower PCs (<1GHZ), Outlook feels faster than Thunderbird. I think messages actually load faster too.

    4. I would encourage everyone who's IMAP addicted to run a few email clients concurrently and use each for it's strongest features. This is where IMAP surpasses Exchange handily.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2004
    One of the strongest IMAP clients is actually Chatter, from http://www.imchatter.com . This is for the Treo 600 (PalmOS). It supports instant messaging (via a Jabber gateway to Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ/AIM) too. The IMAP support includes IDLE on up to four folders simultaneously, and uses async IO so everything happens in the background.

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2004
    Welcome to my web wanderings :: IMAP Client reviews and comments.

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2004
    IDLE support for Mozilla/Thunderbird, so it will be in the next release!

    Sometimes things catch up fast... :-)

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2004
    (And sometimes you click "Submit" to fast as well)

    IDLE support for Mozilla/Thunderbird went in today!

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2004
    That's great news ;-).

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2004
    Here is the relavent post:

    http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4349

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2004
    Thunderbird 0.5+ has a fix for the IDLE support, and it handles the IMAP connections much better than before. The improvement is more noticeable behind a corporate firewall. I am no longer getting "unable to copy to sent folder" when I am sending out a message when Thunderbird has been sitting in the background for a while, and there is now a prompt for retrin copying to the sent message if Thunderbird encounters an error.

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2004
    Forgot to mention that Thundertray is a great addition to Thunderbird. It allows you to keep Thunderbird running with no icon in the taskbar, but it keeps an icon on the system tray.

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2004
    I checked their site and they are still listing only .5. I'll upgrade when .6 is out. Thanks for the info!

  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2004
    I am new to IMAP, FastMail and Thunderbird.
    Previously I was just a 'POP' person...and found TheBat! to be an awesome if unattractive mailer.

    TheBat v2.x has much improved IMAP support. OutlookExpress (OE) is the easiest /most transparent to use IMAP with. ThunderBird is very nice...but hard to learn how to use ...eg hard to learn how to use IMAP with it...unlike OE. TB was a lot better when a kind person on a FastMail forum pointed out there was such a thing as an 'offline' extension and I needed to instal it. And this business of adding codes to user.js files or whatever in T-Bird doesn't appeal to me...ie I am reasonably computer literate, but no aficionado, Yes...I know T-bird is a technology preview...but it will be GREAT when it is as user friendly as say OE.....

    SteveL the neophyte- Australia PS excuse the typos..

  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2004
    my experiences:
    Eudora totally didn't work for me, either. too bad. i'd like to like it.

    O.E. sometimes deletes all my mail.

    I'm using Mulberry now-- I think the interface must have been designed by the guy in the dark office with the big beard and the birkenstocks with socks- it is just so bad, and there are bugs and half implemented features. i understand they will come out with a new interface next year.

    Looking forward to trying thunderbird again!

    -matteo

  • Anonymous
    March 18, 2004
    Edit the pref may be dangerous and the TBird can edit it. Use only user.js instead.

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2004
    It appears that Entourage doesn't support IMAP shared folders. Can anyone confirm this? Where can I log this as a feature request?

    Ben

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2004
    I'll make sure it gets entered in our bug database

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2004
    Oh happy day! In a random search I came up with this page and then this one, which tell how...

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2004
    Here is log file proof that Outlook (2003 at least) has IDLE support:

    IMAP: 16:09:42 [rx] + entering idle mode

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2004
    Outlook has always supported IDLE. The reply attributions are also more flexible than presented above -- although perhaps not quite what many users want. I was also surprised by the comment about Outlook search: What email client has better searching than the Outlook Advanced Find?

    I tried Mulberry this past week and realized just how spoiled I am with Outlook. Other clients may have better IMAP support -- storing sent items and drafts on the server, more efficient purging of deleted items, etc. -- but they don't have many of the basic usability advantages of Outlook and none of the integration with other office programs. Mail without integration is of marginal use to me.

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2004
    The big killer for me with Outlook isn't only how horrible it works with IMAP. It's the giant letdown that even though non-email forms (Contacts, Calendars) can easily be stored in IMAP folders in a retrievable way, Outlook doesn't do it. Support for that just seems like it should be so natural, and it's not there. It's also the reason why my Ipaq has been sitting in a dresser drawer for six months.

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2004
    Are they ever going to add client-side filtering for OE IMAP?

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2004
    I love the filters such as "View -> Threads -> Threads with unread". Unfortunately it cannot be accessed quickly. One has to go through the menu list on the top.
    Nevertheless that's very handy especially for newsgroups.

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2004
    But how many of the clients that support IDLE is able to monitor all by boxes -- with one connection? I sometimes sae Outlook having a whole slew of IMAP connections open to the same server. That is completely unacceptable.

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2004
    That is an imap limitation (you can only have one idle connection to a server).

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2004
    http://www.pmail.com/overviews/ovw_winpmail.htm

    "Support for all major Internet mail-related protocols - SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, LDAP, PH"

    "MailMerge allows you to create customized form letters to multiple recipients"

    "Mail filtering; Pegasus Mail pioneered this in 1991, and it's still the most powerful implementation of automated rule-based filtering you'll find in a mail client."

    and more...


  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2004
    If Mozilla Thunderbird had the following by default then it would be the perfect IMAP client:
    1) Auto-poll all folders, not just the inbox.
    2) Backup/restore
    3) Ability to send an email and store it to IMAP Sent folder by uploading once, not twice. More apparant when uploading with attachments. Dont know if there's a solution to this.
    4) Minimise to system tray.
    5) Better notifications (eg persistant until acknowledged) when emails are received, especially for emails sent from someone in my address book.

    Still, as it stands with v0.7, it's an excellent client. Far better than Eudora.

    ..Ant

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2004
    Anybody know a good spam filter for Outlook that works with IMAP accounts? Thank You.

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2004
    Omar,

    I'm with you on the importance of plain-text, format=flowed email. But then why doesn't Enourage (X) support it? I'm planning to buy the upgrade to Entourage 2004 because of its greater compatibility with Exchange, but I haven't seen anything on the web that suggests that Entourage 2004 supports format=flowed either

    Apple Mail implements this feature perfectly, and I've been hoping Entourage 2004 does as well.

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2004
    Sadly, Entourage does not support format=flowed. This is on the feature list though (and has been for a long time). Unfortunatley we were not able to get it into 2004.

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2004
    Oh, well! :-(. Thanks for the reply!

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2004
    We have a Groupwise 5.2 GWIA. It runs IMAP4. My T'Bird IMAP client is unable to show/read MIME attachments.
    Any solution for that?

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2004
    A good spam filter for Outlook is http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/. I have been using it for over 6 months with good results.

    I continually have the stupidest problems with Outlook - when I delete email accounts I can't remove the account from the folder list on the left, the application is always checking mail in subscribed folders rather than letting me read/write mail, etc.

    As someone mentioned above, if Thunderbird would integrate with contacts, tasks, and calendar and sync with a Palm I would switch in a heartbeat. Don't any application developers care about these problems? IMAP and converged devices are getting so popular one would assume that there would be a single solid product out there for this need.

  • Anonymous
    September 04, 2004
    If you often encounter error messages like "Server your_imap.server.org has disconnected. The server may have gone down or there may be a network problem." when trying to access Courier-IMAP from an IMAP client (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird), there are two approaches...

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2006
    Well, whaddaya know

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