[Leaplist] Zimbra crazy awesome

[Jason Boxman]

I'd given up on finding a graphical client that intuitively handles email and calendaring.  I tried Postbox and Spicebird, but based upon the Thunderbird codebase, but quickly dropped both.

Enter Zimbra.  The 'desktop' client is quite slick and works with regular IMAP, POP, and has options to work directly with Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, gmail, and others.  While not a true native client, it is based on Prism, a trimmed down version of the Firefox rendering engine.

My biggest negatives so far seem to be

1) Large resource requirements, predominately due to Java components
- 250M overhead on my XP box
- 300M+ on my Linux box
2) No TLS support (SSL works, but requires legacy port open on server)
3) I can't sort my mail most recent at the bottom; it paginates your mail
4) Drafts are always 'unread' for ZCS accounts (not vanilla IMAP)
- I tend to use my drafts as a dumping ground for files or notes
- The Briefcase feature in Zimbra likely eliminates that necessity
5) Doesn't understand Courier's usage of '.INBOX' as IMAP root
- Only matters on Courier for ZD's IMAP support
- Results in dumb looking nesting under 'Inbox' of all subfolders
- Irrelevant for native ZCS accounts, of course
6) Can't send to mailing lists by middle clicking on ml folder
- Cute kmail feature I shall miss
7) I can't manually expire messages via cron script for ZCS accounts
- find + xargs + rm

Of course, that's just the desktop client, Zimbra Desktop.

You get some sweet bonus functionality if you run the ZCS Open Source (tm) edition on your server, which bundles Jetty, MySQL, Postfix, slapd and some other goodies into a forced /opt/zimbra installation.  With more effort, it eventually all works.  It's initially resource intensive, until you turn off or skip installing the anti-virus, spam, and spell server (Apache+PHP) components.  (1GB RAM minimum recommended as far as I can tell, but I'm running it on a 256MB VM with just the core components and no tuning.) [I can't recommend VirtualBox enough.]

If you want to slog through the installation and understanding of how the components work together, I think it's well worth the effort.

(But I was sold when I discovered you could tag any attribute with a tag of your choice, all server side, along with all other meta data if you're using the server components.)

The Web client is more or less identical to Zimbra Desktop, with lower overhead, though you can only use that with ZCS itself; You need ZD if you want to use it as a regular IMAP client, without the ZCS itself.

Oh, and it all proxies nicely via Apache with mod_proxy.

I have no stake in Zimbra, just excited to find a collaboration suite that doesn't suck.  (Horde was similarly difficult to setup initially, but was complete and utter suck to 'use'.)

Hrm, need to play with the signature option...


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