After a lengthy discussion with the fine folks at Zimbra (who not only took time out to try and help me, but did so on my blog), it seems my Mail problems are twofold.
Firstly, I'm running an old version of Zimbra (4.0; current version is 4.5, with 5.0 in RC). Well, it's good to know, but doesn't really help me out: most of my colleagues won't be updating to Leopard until they get new hardware (hopefully Apple will announce new laptops soon, so they can upgrade), and the sysadmin time to upgrade the entire organisation to the latest version of Zimbra certainly can't be justified to solve one person's problems.
Secondly, Apple's Mail.app is broken, according to this lengthy thread on the support site. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, I guess.
So, what to do? Downgrade to Tiger, or something more drastic?
I opted for "more drastic", and set up a permanent redirect for all my email, pushing it over to my Google Mail account. Since GMail now supports IMAP, it should be a safe place for my data. I followed this howto on proper GMail IMAP for Apple Mail, which usefully explains special folders such as Drafts, Trash, Sent. There's a few wrinkles to sort out, but mostly it's working. It was easy to set up filters in GMail to match my most important Apple Mail filters.
My biggest concern is that the 'All Mail' folder on my Mac will end up holding duplicates of every email stored (since it is the equivalent of Google's 'Archive Mail'); this could be a huge space waste. I would remove it from the list of IMAP folder subscriptions, but subscriptions don't seem to be supported by GMail's IMAP implementation.
The biggest problem is I'm currently limited to ~ 40k/s upstream, so synchronising my existing mailboxes and moving my mail archive from machine to machine is proving painful. GMail seems to time out every now and then as well, dropping SSL connections, which causes Mail to grind to a halt.
Meanwhile kottke picks up on another problem I'd noticed - unread mail counts are incorrect with IMAP.
More notes when I finally get everything stabilised.
Technorati Tags: apple, gmail, google, leopard, mail, open source, open standards, osx, zimbra
Posted by savs at November 8, 2007 8:39 PM