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Zimbra from Yahoo

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16 pointsheed23 comments

Zimbra is used as the email system for a university I attended and it is a terrible, buggy pos.

I wouldn't go that far. Zimbra was the first client I was willing to use over Mutt. It taught me the value of Gmail-style conversation threading. It has strong IMAP support, and a reasonable J2ME client. It never ate my data, and I was able to use it on a daily basis for a year.

"Gmail killer" is wonderfully hyperbolic, but in its space, it's really not a bad option. Especially when measured against other self-hosted webmail + calendaring solutions. Of which there are two: Horde and Outlook Web Access.

I'm personally pulling for Bongo (http://bongo-project.org/), but I think it's more likely that this space will be ceded to Google Apps.

I've worked for a ~100 person company that switched from Exchange to Zimbra last year.

While many aspects of the system work great, others are buggy, difficult, or practically useless. (For example, the calendar features are miserably immature, and the web interface is clunky and eschewed by most employees.)

The company is currently considering switching back to Exchange.

My previous company used Zimbra for 6 month, after 3 months almost everybody switched to Gmail, it was an absolute pain to use back then, after 6 months we got rid of Zimbra. It was 2 years ago.

We're using Zimbra at work right now. It got better, but it's not even close to Gmail when it comes to read/write/manage emails: it's slow, and has numerous quirks. But it has a built-in IMAP & SMTP server, so you don't need to use the webmail.

But it's also doing much more than Emails, it's definitely a good alternative to Exchange, but switching from Gmail to Zimbra? I wouldn't even think about it.

Exchange killer.

The pricing and marketing copy for Zimbra are all pretty clearly geared at the enterprise/educational market rather than consumers. So yes, Exchange killer.

Yahoo's consumer email product is, obviously, Yahoo Mail, which has massively higher market share than Gmail. If anything, GMail is supposed to be a Yahoo Mail killer.

I use gmail at home, zimbra at work.

Advantages of Zimbra:

-Group calendaring

-Folders (having to subscribe to a bunch of FOSS email lists at work I appreciate just filling away the mailing lists into a folder for later, way better than Gmail's way with the tags and searching and stuff)

Advantage of Gmail:

-Better search of archived mail

Zimbra seems to have some more quirks than gmail that are getting better. They both have decent iPhone interfaces. I wouldn't give up Gmail for Zimbra at home, but for work Zimbra does the job equal or better than Gmail.

Couldn't you use Google Calendar for group calendaring? Just have everybody add the mygroup@gmail.com calendar as an overlay.

And folders are just a degenerate case of labels, where each message can only have one label. You can set up a filter to "label as emacs-devel and archive", and watch the unread count in the labels box. Just as easy as folders, though it's harder to have a "favorites" list like in Outlook.

Not exactly. Zimbra also keeps track of when people are busy and when rooms are available and things like that (in addition to supporting push email on iPhones).

As another commenter pointed out, it's more of an Exchange replacement than a Google Apps replacement.

> having to subscribe to a bunch of FOSS email lists at work I appreciate just filling away the mailing lists into a folder for later, way better than Gmail's way with the tags and searching and stuff

Sorry. I feel like I'm bringing up VIM vs. Emacs or something here, but please explain how folders are in any way different from tags and filters.

Why can't you just create a filter that tags your FOSS stuff and then auto-archives it?

Tags can't be nested.

In GMail, a simple slash will nest the tags if you're accessing it from an IMAP client. Also, if you start the tag it'll show up as a subfolder of your inbox. Filtering mailing lists to INBOX/ml/foo, INBOX/ml/bar and auto-archiving works quite well for me.

Even if it was better than GMail it would take at least a year or two to start replacing Gmail users, until there google will be workig harder adding new features to Gmail what will make users don't switch to Zimbra.

So Zimbra isn't Gmail's killer and won't be anytime soon.

i play frisbee with a guy who's a top IT guy at a leading telecom company. he says they went back to outlook from zimbra. they are now looking at google apps since it has full full outlook support.

zimbra is great but it's not free for all unlike gmail.

So not true. The Community Edition is completely free and we use it at my company.

What do you not get with the CE? No Outlook connector, no Apple iSync plugin, no mobile BES plugin, and no ability to delegate the administration of specific domains to particular users. But for a plug-and-play solution, it's awesome. POP3, IMAP, LDAP, CalDav (including Free/Busy times extensions) work flawlessly. Uses Postfix for the SMTP so you can do lots of tricks behind the scene if necessary. Administration is a breeeze. My company migrated to Zimbra from our home-grown Qmail/CourierIMAP solution, and it's one of the best IT Infrastructure decisions we've ever made.

Also, No hot backups. For companies that need email without downtime this could be a deal breaker.

I administer the CE version at my work and it is a mostly no fuss package and was much better than the collaboration platform that we were using.

You could get around that by making a snapshot LV on Linux. Instant, point in time volume that you can now back up, then destroy later.

Is there a problem with restoring it if when you took a snapshot the database had unfinished transactions? I guess you just would not have the transactions written to disk and would lose whatever changes were being made.

Could there be a time where you take a snapshot when the database is writing the transactions to disk and corrupts the snapshots db? or is the LV smart enough to handle that?

why is this on the front page? its not related to gmail. its not new. its not hacker news related.

How would Zimbra be a Gmail killer if Yahoo Mail has many times more users than Gmail?

Zimbra is good, but it's not Gmail.

I knew a guy who dated a girl that used to date a guy who worked in the IT dept of a company that used to have Exchange and then switched to Zimbra but now uses Google Apps. For what it's worth

;)

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