A real day of email......

[genius36]

After finally started doing a real day of work using sugar. Tasks are great. The dashlets superb (except that they are not wide enough).

But email...... ouch. I feel like I should shrink down a bit to fit in that tiny window. Certainly nothing a boomer could deal with. My Lasik comes in handy, but not that handy.

Why not just give me a portal and I'll go read my email over there and cut and paste it?
What should I use? I hear talk of outlook, thunderbird, etc. Whats a way to handle this with multiple users?

Why do they import anyways? Aren't they just already there.

Yes, I know this is nothing more than a rant, but seriously, I don't know how you do it. How does anyone here deal with the email window?

I'm on the community edition, I know, but certainly there's a better way than me importing them in that tiny window and then wondering if they are going to be found anywhere later.

[blinkie]

The email client is much improved at this point. In fact, it now looks like a really good webmail client until you start using it as a complete replacement for something else. What we've found is:

1) Deleting mail is slow. Real slow. Unnecessarily slow. And no, it's not our backend.

2) Inbound attachments are a problem in that they are often screwed up in some way that the data itself seems to be missing although a 4k (or something like that) file is downloaded, with the correct filename. Clearing the mailbox cache (in Sugar's email client) seems to fix the problem occasionally. The file is always there if you use a regular mail client.

3) Email messages including multiple attachments sometimes only show one attachment...which will then fail to download properly (see 2 above).

4) The selection of an outbound from address is totally illogical or at least not intuitive.

5) There is no real support for "personas" so that although it's great that we can setup group mailboxes, we often find that users will forget to set BOTH the outbound from address and the appropriate outbound signature. This is a basic feature folks.

6) The cache. What is the point of this? We use IMAP. Our IMAP server is fast. Our IMAP server (courier) can adeptly provide the horsepower to fuel any other webmail client with ease...we don't need no stinkin cache fouling things up in between. At least, I'm blaming the cache for items 1-3 above.

7) Support for distribution lists would be nice. That is, internal email lists.

8) It would be nice if the columns would remain at the size and placement to wherever you set them.

9) It would be nice if the darn email folder hiearchy didn't collapse everytime the mailbox refreshed itself.

10) It would be nice if we could leverage such turn of the century technology as IMAP IDLE instead of this 90s technology polling nonsense.

In the meantime, I can't convince our users to stop using Thunderbird or Apple Mail, or a different webmail client all together...which doesn't help us folks in IT cut down on the number of systems we're trying to support.

[blinkie]

Wow. No other responses to this thread huh? Guess it'll be quite some time until the email client is improved then! Such a shame.

Let me just add that the other problem I've come across is that I can drag a single message into the Trash folder but not multiple messages. Tried it on Firefox and Safari. I can drag multiple messages into other folders but not into Trash. Weird.

I've also been experimenting with SugarBird and Thunderbird. But have found that SugarBird is kind of flaky.

If the issues mentioned in my previous post could be addressed then I think the Sugar Email client would be pretty awesome. The potential is there but it just misses the boat "by that much" to make it tough to use.

[SugarDev.net]

The thing about the portal is not true, you can add your web email application to Sugar using the portal function (you can make it a tab) and cut-paste the emails.

Another workaround: Use the Sugar email client if you want to archive something, and another one for the usual email related tasks. This works if you have decentralized email, like IMAP.

[blinkie]

Another workaround:...

I think that pretty much sums up the Sugar experience so far (from 4.x to 5.x). It's just one "workaround" after another and nothing just, well, works. Most of the modules are still kinda half-baked (missing some critical function or another). Case in point: while its easy to get data into Sugar it's awkward to get it out without dipping into the db directly...like when you need to export a targeted contact list for running a land-based mail campaign.

With the recent announcement that proper Calendar functionality is at least a year away, I've got to wonder how much longer until this package actually works? You know, the way real users expect it to work?

But hey, Thunderbird's been around forever too and even with TB 3 beta you still can't edit a signature from within the app.