[LINK] RFI: Has Anyone Looked at Zimbra?

[Paul Bolger]

Downloaded and took a look at Desktop. My first reaction is "what
problem is this trying to solve?". It looks like a not very pretty
email client that will, if you let it, download your entire account to
your local machine. I tried that once with Gmail, and got about a gb
into it before realising that it was probably not a good idea, partly
because I use about five different machines to access email. Give me a
server-based local backup system (save all my emails to a local NAS or
similar, and then use it if my internet access is down) and I might be
interested, but this seems like going back to POP.
I must say that I'm astonished that email clients in 2011 are still
all so bad. Today I spent half an hour trying to reconfigure a
friend's Outlook to receive Google Apps IMAP email. I wanted to set a
receive address and port, a send address and port, and Outlook keeps
wanting me to specify a 'homepage' for the email account... why?
Thunderbird's not much better - it has a horrible account setup
'wizard' (although in fairness it seems to work most of the time now,
which it didn't when Thunderbird 3 came out). And it doesn't allow one
to export and import account settings in an XML file. I have a lot of
email accounts. Some are not used that often: 'admin@' 'bounce@' -
that sort of thing. What I really need is to be able to maintain a
single setup file which will allow me to set them all up on a machine
by simply specifying a config file. I don't know of anything which
does this at present.


On 20 April 2011 18:28, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:
> I'm mainly talking about the Zimbra Desktop ("the next-generation
> email and collaboration client"):
> http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html
>
> But experience with the other elements would be interesting too.
>
> I think this is on-topic for link, because 'the next generation' of
> email, incl. 'genuine SMTP/POP/IMAP email', webmail and IMs, is
> something that Internet users have needed since RFC822 became 'fully
> mature', years ago.
>
> --
> Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
>
> Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
>                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
> mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/
>
> Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
> Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University
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