Who needs standards?

I've matured enough in my career that I don't generally spout off against Microsoft unless there's a really good reason.

I have a really good reason.

The company I work for uses Exchange server to handle their mail. I don't use Windows, so I don't use Outlook. I use Thunderbird, which is an excellent mail client. The problem is that Thunderbird doesn't directly support any of Microsoft's not-quite-standard ways of accessing Exchange server directly. So my company IT department, bowing to the inevitability of Linix and Mac OS users, has turned on IMAPS and smtp with ttl to support us non-Outlook users.

The problem is that the IMAPS implementation is horribly slow. I keep my email inbox trimmed to less than 100 messages. In order to do this, though, I have an Archive folder that has thousands of messages. Moving 50 messages from Inbox to Archive can take 3 minutes--an unacceptably long time. Moreover, opening the Archive folder can take more than 5 minutes, despite the fact that the folder index is locally cached.

These issues aside, though, it's the sheer inconsitency of the performance that drives me truly insane. Usually, mail flows into the Inbox just as you would expect--a new message arrives, you click it and you read it in the preview pane. Sometimes, though, you click it and the preview pane doesn't get updated. You have to click 'Get Mail' and have the message fetched again before it will really show up.

Because I manage people, our Oracle system sends me emails about their timecards. At the very bottom of these emails are handy links so that I can approve or reject a timecard without having to log on to the Oracle web interface. 75% of the time, the entire message cannot be retrieved from the server, and I can't see these buttons. Not 100% of the time, mind you--75% of the time. It's not like the message is significantly different from one time to the next--in fact, they're invariably exactly the same expect for dates (salaried employees).

There are numerous other headaches, all related to IMAPS and all truly annoying. I've never encountered this many annoyances when working with a bog standard (as defined by the IETF) IMAP or IMAPS server.