The world seen from an IT consultant's perspective: Kerio Outlook connector

It is not often that I find 3rd party providers to Outlook. But the Kerio connector is an exception.

Kerio Connect is a full blown mail server running on both Windows and Linux. Read my review here.

The Outlook connector ships in two variants. One offline edition and one online edition. I have not tried the online version as I need my email offline. To set up the new account just add a new service, and you will find Kerio Connect as an option.

I have now tried this connector for about three weeks, not with heavy load though.

It seems to be a little buggy, it has crashed Outlook one time (my guess, as I got a Kerio error message just before it crashed) and seems to be a little bit out of sync – at least when I update my mail from serveral places (IMAP, HTTP) at the same time. But over time everything seems to be in sync.

I have a setup with three mail accounts in my Outlook profile (remember, Outlook can only run one profile at a given time!), one is the Exchange connector (default), one is a POP3 account and the third one is the Kerio connector. During setup, the Kerio connector complained about not being the default account – but that did not bother me. The only “error” I see is that when I send emails now the sent items are stored on the default account (Exchange) insted of the accounts sent items folder.

Some special features of Kerio Connect is present in the Outlook connector. They are mark messages as spam and the Out of office feature.

Kerio Outlook connector

By default only the inbox is synchronized to the local computer, this can be set individually on each account. Probably to save bandwidth.

If you have created public folders on your mail server you can access them as well from Outlook. Contacts also seems to be supported, but I have not tried them out yet.

In all, I find this to be a very good and handy connector that seems to work fairly well.