Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Open Source
Zimbra: Open source webmail and calendar suite gives Gmail a run for its money
by Jordan Running Sep 12th 2005 at 5:15PM
Two things will struck me when I checked out the demo of Zimbra, an open source webmail and calendar suite: One, "Wow, this looks and works a lot like Gmail," and two, "This is open-source software??" Zimbra is seriously slick to a degree seen infrequently in new open source projects. There's a lot of Gmail in there: The popular conversation view--a feature I hope every e-mail client includes a year from now--is there, though it works a bit differently when reading messages and can optionally be turned off. Labels are there, too, though Zimbra calls them tags and uses a nice color-coded icon approach. And like Gmail, each conversation's subject is accompanied by a snipped of the body, you can add a flag to any message akin to Gmail's stars, and there's a big search bar right at the top of the app.On top of all the Gmail-inspired features, however, Zimbra heaps tons more. Hovering over a message yields a short preview of the message, and hovering over a contact's name or e-mail address wherever it appears will show you all of their stored information, e.g. company, title, phone number, etc., and you can drag-and-drop messages onto folders or labels. And then there's the calendar, which is integrated into the e-mail compontent in a very handy way: when you see a date in a message you can hover over it to see if you have any appointments scheduled that day or right-click to add a new appointment to your calendar.
I won't even go into the developer APIs, but for the curious, Zimbra is build in Java and supports POP and IMAP and lots of other acronyms, includes spam and virus protection and, of course, is free to download.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Barb Dybwad said 4:41PM on 10-07-2005
The AJAXian goodness of this interface is quite sweet. The integration between email and calendar is awesome, and in general the integration of information you've always thought should be integrated is here (e.g. phone numbers in emails get a contextual menu to make Skype calls -- brilliant). I love that you can mouse over bits of data like dates (even relative dates like "tomorrow" or "next Tuesday") and get tooltip-type summaries of relevant information like what's on the calendar for that day, which means less switching between interfaces, which means incremental time saved. Score!
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Marc Orchant said 12:08PM on 9-13-2005
This is a great start. They need to add a task manager (to-do list) to the goodness next with the same capabilities as the calendar module and this could be a real challenge to Outlook Web Access - especially if they can find a way for non-Exchange Outlook users (and there are a ton of them out there) to sync or at least import/export their local PST data with the web-based offering. Switching costs are pretty high when trying to convince existing OUtlook users to consider another option.
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G Lyn said 2:23PM on 9-13-2005
more of a question than a comment - how can you get this to work in windows ?
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Thomas said 2:37PM on 9-13-2005
Looks like a decent start but the demo runs horribly on a G4 Powerbook 667 and only ok on an iMac G5. Not even close to Gmail goodness for me.
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Anthony said 11:41AM on 9-20-2005
anyone know how to install this on a webserver?
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