Gmail / Outlook is like a bad marriage, you will end up in divorce at some point and not even get me started on Outlook using IMAP (what a disaster) Trying to make Outlook work with any other system other than Exchange as a collaboration suite (That's what Exchange/Outlook really is) it could become a nightmare really fast. Sure, if we are only talking about simple send / receive emails, heck for that you can use Thunderbird a far as I'm concerned. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO EXCHANGE SERVER if your end-users are Outlook clients. We have a handy comparison chart that shows what features are available with Outlook Connector, ActiveSync, Webmail and IMAP, which you'll find here: Also, users looking for the groupware features that Outlook Connector provides can also use ActiveSync, which is supported by later versions of Outlook. MDaemon Connector for Outlook (formerly Outlook Connector) has been greatly improved over the years, with improved performance. I'm willing to bet a greenfield MDaemon environment with the Outlook Connector would likely perform fine. However, if I recall, those issues stemmed from some of the mailboxes being ridiculously large, and this particular MDaemon installation being upgraded several times over the years. Personally, I had a terrible experience with MDaemon Outlook Connector instability.

MDaemon can work as well, if you insist on your E-mail service running on Windows.

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