Opera is not a good IMAP client

I've been using Opera for a long time now as my e-mail client. The partnership I work in, Miley Watts LLP, has been looking at Zimbra for a while as an e-mail and calendaring server, and we finally have that in place (via a hosted service, which is definitely the most painless way to go). Zimbra provides IMAP, so I looked forwards to migrating away from POP, and being able to maintain a hierarchy of mail folders on the mail server.

However, it turns out that Opera isn't a good enough IMAP client. The functionality is there, but what I've found is that Opera doesn't refresh its view of your IMAP folders unless you stop it and start it again. That makes it fairly useless. Sometimes you can get it to refresh by opening and closing the e-mail configuration dialog, but it isn't consistent, nor immediate, as a solution. Indeed, from the forums it is clear that many people have exactly the same problem, but some have different IMAP problems, so the issue may be to do with Opera's interactions with particular IMAP mail servers.

Whatever it is, it's very disappointing. None of the other other e-mail clients around seem to do as good a job as Opera does. I don't care a lot for Outlook (which doesn't run under Linux anyway), and Notes isn't great either. Evolution has a reputation for being slow and bloated, and one of my partners is telling me that Thunderbird's bugs are likely to drive him to using Outlook, even though he doesn't like it much either.

If Opera don't do something about this soon, and it's a pretty big issue, I'm going to be forced to switch, with all of the migration pain that goes with that. Ouch.