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What is Zimbra

Zimbra is a cool closed and opensource email system. I’ve only used the opensource version, but I assume the closed version is twice as nice, but I refuse to pay the price. Bad rhyming aside, the closed version offers you an outlook syncing plugin and live backup options. The opensource version runs postfix/spamassasin/clam, right out of the box. I run it on Centos and install via an RPM, so it is quick and easy to get going. This was produced by Yahoo, so you know the user/admin interface will be flash and friendly. Did I mention that the server package is cross platform capable?

Admin Interface:

Zimbra Admin
Zimbra Admin

Zimbra User:

Zimbra User
Zimbra User

As you can see, the user interface is sick! It is basically outlook in a browser.

They also have the desktop client, which is a java app that is virtually an outlook replacement.

Comments

2 responses to “What is Zimbra”

  1. Tom Waterloo Avatar
    Tom Waterloo

    My brother does bulk emailing for a couple of clients. He has been using QMail for the past ten years. Not the easiest of interfaces but is truly a great program for bulk emails. Super stable and reliable.

    In my business we switched over to free Domain hosting with Gmail. There is a limit of 500 email sends per day per user. But not having to worry about backups, spam, server hosting, bandwidth or viruses all for free is tough to beat. I would highly recommend Domain hosted email from Gmail for any company. Gmail also has a pay per user version where emails cannot be deleted. Never used the for pay version but I would certainly if I ran a Hippa compliant biz.

  2. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Tom,

    Again, thanks for the comment.

    I’ve been running my businesses through Gmail’s free email services for a while now, and I really like it! The integration of file storage is great also! There are some cases for privately hosted email these days, though.

    One would be truly secure mail! I can rest easy knowing that my personal mail server is secure because I’m bonkers when it comes to my personal server’s security. Gmail is accessible to anyone in the world who would like to attempt a hack. Although, I’m pretty sure Google has a good security team 😉

    I’ve also seen some government contracts that state that their email can’t reside on a server that is used to house any other organization’s email.

    In my opinion, not having to deal with server maint/backups is priceless!

    I believe I also read that Google has secured a license for an outlook connector, so Gmail can appear to your outlook as if it were an exchange server!!!

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