Kolab-compliant mail client?

[Andreas Gungl]

On Monday 12 April 2004 22:40, Bradley Alexander wrote:
> I have tried a couple and wanted to post some opinions and get some
> feedback. Thus far, I have tried

Our company has been running Kolab for about 9 month. We started with LDAP 
only in the beginning. We've switched from our existing mail server to 
Kolab about 6 months ago. Most of our users use IMAP but no calendar 
support. For them it's easy to select a client - IMAP is supported by most 
of them.
If you want to use the calendar functionality you may want to use Outlook 
with a plugin. I've tested Binary for a while, but I was not really 
satisfied. Aethera is another possibility. The client is promising. There 
are still some rough edges, but it's usable. There are rumours that the 
next release should be significantly better - that would be really good for 
those who are bound to Windows.
Aethera would be my favorite client on Windows. But I'm using Linux and 
there you can do better using KDE. There are some options for the KDE user 
regarding a KDE Kolab client. You can run the Kroupware Client on KDE 3.1. 
This is a stable solution. You can run KDE 3.2.x - Kontact already does a 
good job. Running the standalone applications (KMail, KOrganizer, 
KAddressbook) is possible as well and the functionality is the same. The 
most difficult issue might be the setup of the resources to make the 
programs use the Kolab server. It is a little bit tricky for those who are 
not familiar with Kolab and it's KDE clients.
IMHO the best client (although still under development) is Kontact from KDE 
CVS HEAD. There is a separate release for the KDE PIM package scheduled 
(see 
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kdepim-3.3-release-plan.html ).

> KMail:
> Pros
> o  Very nice GPG integration (though I'm still trying to make heads or
> tails of the crypto plugins)
The plugin mechanism will be replaced in the next version.  Life will 
certainly get easier for you.
> o  Nice interface
>
> Cons
> o  Manual filter application is making me crazy.
You should try to use Sieve scripts to filter your messages on the server. 
This is not supported by KMail, i.e. you have to setup it manually. I did 
so and I'm really satisfied with it. It was not much work and so I can wait 
until KMail will support that in a later release.
> o  Doesn't handle spam very gracefully (I'm using Ian's HOWTO) yet. I'm
> still working this issue. Spamassassin works, but I haven't yet found a
> way to filter.
Did you look at http://kmail.kde.org/tools.html#antispam ? BTW, the next 
KMail release will provide a wizard to setup KMail to make use of anti spam 
tools installed on your system.
> o  Filtering is pretty basic. Filter on to/from/subject/mailing list
I'm not sure what you mean. (Filtering in KMail is powerfull, but there are 
problems to filter messages in IMAP folders.)
> o  Cannot create folders on the IMAP server.
Well, this will be fixed by the next release too. (I've no problems with it 
but i'm running CVS snapshots.)

Regards,
Andreas