Microsoft Outlook freezes when IMAP email store is large

A friend was fed up with poor integration and deliberately broken standards support from Microsoft products and blurted the following on Twitter.

Supermathie "Hi, my name is Outlook! Oh, you have more 
than 1.9GB of mail in your IMAP store? I'll just stand here 
drooling like a retarded platypus."

A touch of frustration perhaps? Probably.

I wondered aloud to Twitter if some of the Microsoft-folk following me knew of a fix for this failing in Microsoft Outlook?

So here are the replies I received from my friends in the order that they arrived.

1. Mozilla Thunderbird
2. Gnome Evolution
3. KDE Kmail
4. Sylpheed
5. Gnome Balsa

I'll add more fixes for Outlook as they come in from Microsoft staffers^[1].

[1] Not all replies are directly from Microsoft employees. Some of them had to use their non-work address to protect their identities.