Looking for input from Kontact users

[ITSEF Admin]

Hi all,

This plea for input goes to all folks out there who are using the Kontact 
client in conjunction with Kolab - I am very curious as to your experiences 
and environments, as our own experience with Kontact is extremely bad. Hence, 
I'm looking for anything that could possibly help to alleviate the 
situation - short of migrating to another mail/groupware solution... The 
things I'm interested in:

- What version of Kontact are you using (e35, "the one that came with the 
distribution", ...)?
- On which platform and with how many users?
- How are your home directories organised (NFS mounted, local, .....)?
- Do you use DIMAP only or the split IMAP/DIMAP set-up?
- What are your experiences with Kontact with regard to
  * stability (crashes...)
  * reliability (lost mail, lost appointments, ....)
  * overall "good behaviour"


A bit of background from my side: We are using Kontact e35 from Kolab, 
repackaged for use under Kubuntu 10.04LTS - which means a KDE 3.5.x Kontact 
running under KDE4. All our home directories are mounted on the workstations 
via NFS4 and we only have a few dozen users. As the performance of DIMAP on 
NFS mounted home directories has proven to be desastrous in the past, we are 
using IMAP for mail and DIMAP for groupware only.
Overall, Kontact has proven to be very crashprone for many (though not all) of 
our users and also has the tendency to show erratic behaviour (mails that 
seem to be empty, mails that were once deleted and show up again, slow-downs, 
you name it). Most of these affect a large number of our users (though, 
again, not all) and most of the time they are fixed by throwing away the IMAP 
index files. Any attempts in figuring out patterns for reproducing the 
problems to provide the developers with useful input have failed so far, as 
have attempts to figure out why some users are affected and others are not. 
For those that *are* affected, throwing away index files has almost become a 
habit, but it only helps for a while. Same goes for ditching the complete KDE 
configuration - it helps, but not for too long.
Things in fact have gotten so bad that we are considering a migration... :-( 
Does any of this sound familiar to anyone out there - or are we just the 
unlucky ones? :-}

Thank you in advance for any input!

Reagards,

Thomas
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           Thomas Ribbrock, IT-Team brightsight