How do you optimize your Outlook Exchange + IMAP setup?
- by Mike
My company provides an Outlook/Exchange account we must use for mail/calendar. Like many companies, they unfortunately also provide a ridiculously small mail quota.
I got tired of managing and backing up .pst files (since I'm always in my e-mail there is never a good time to back it up), so I started storing my archived mail "in the cloud", using an IMAP server I set up on my Linux box.
This has a few drawbacks for me:
IMAP (at least the implementation in Outlook) is *very slow*. Furthermore, if I move a large number of messages to the IMAP server, it blocks the entire Outlook client for hours sometimes, which is quite annoying.
Can't use exchange over HTTP to do mail without launching a VPN session, because the client-side rules I have which organize my mail fail and disable the rule if the IMAP server can't be reached.
If I reply to a message from my IMAP store, I have to specify a SMTP server willing to relay for me in order to send e-mail, unless I always remember to select my Exchange account while composing e-mail.
... but the main advantage of being very easy to back up, with a couple of cron jobs that essentially do an 'rsync'.
Short of moving the IMAP server to my local host (which seem like might have the same file locking problems as using a .pst), my options seem limited for solving (1). I'd like to come up with a solution for (2) and (3) though.
For problem (2) would it be possible to somehow tell Outlook that the IMAP server is "offline", and have it synchronize my changes during a periodic "send and receive"? If so, I wonder if it would block the Outlook client, like it does in problem (1), and if it would be compatible with the client-only rules I use to sort my mail into folders.
I've looked all over the options menu and have not found a way to tell Outlook to not use a certain account for sending mail, which would solve (3).
Is anyone else crazy enough to be doing something like this? Any ideas?
