I routinely test Mercury here with mailboxes containing several thousand messages and haven't had any particular problems... As Thomas says, IMAP performance is never going to be quite as good as direct file manipulation, but it should be perfectly bearable.
A lot depends on exactly what the client package is doing: IMAP is quite a dense, complex protocol, and it depends very heavily on clients caching data in sensible ways (probably 75% of the IMAP code in WinPMail revolves around client-side cache management, for example).
One thing to look out for is Anti-virus software. If you have anti-virus software running in the background scanning the user mailbox directories, then this can have a dramatic impact on Mercury's ability to access mail files (factors of 10 or more in some cases), as well as introducing the very real possibility of data damage or folder corruption. It's always better to set up a Mercury Policy to handle anti-virus scanning on mail instead of using background scanner processes, because Policies are properly-integrated into Mercury's workflow.
I'm always working on Mercury's IMAP performance, though - it's one of those areas where there's always something you can tweak here or twist there to wring a little more speed out of the poor old girl. Mercury 4.6 will include some modest IMAP performance improvements, but like I said above, it sounds like your issues may be dependent on other factors.
Cheers!
-- David --
I routinely test Mercury here with mailboxes containing several thousand messages and haven't had any particular problems... As Thomas says, IMAP performance is never going to be quite as good as direct file manipulation, but it should be perfectly bearable.
A lot depends on exactly what the client package is doing: IMAP is quite a dense, complex protocol, and it depends very heavily on clients caching data in sensible ways (probably 75% of the IMAP code in WinPMail revolves around client-side cache management, for example).
One thing to look out for is Anti-virus software. If you have anti-virus software running in the background scanning the user mailbox directories, then this can have a dramatic impact on Mercury's ability to access mail files (factors of 10 or more in some cases), as well as introducing the very real possibility of data damage or folder corruption. It's always better to set up a Mercury Policy to handle anti-virus scanning on mail instead of using background scanner processes, because Policies are properly-integrated into Mercury's workflow.
I'm always working on Mercury's IMAP performance, though - it's one of those areas where there's always something you can tweak here or twist there to wring a little more speed out of the poor old girl. Mercury 4.6 will include some modest IMAP performance improvements, but like I said above, it sounds like your issues may be dependent on other factors.
Cheers!
-- David --
