I’ve been on a long quest for an email client that I like. Granted, my wish list ranged from simple (must not crash constantly) to less simple (synch address books with online account). Despite high resource usage and some interface shortcomings, I think the new version of Yahoo! Zimbra is it. Finally, something to get me out of Thunderbird instability hell! For me, at least, this is a Thunderbird killer. Well, I thought this was a Thunderbird killer until a zillion problems with Zimbra surfaced.

[Below you'll find my glowing review of Zimbra based on my initial install. Everything working well for about a day. Think of that as the potential Zimbra has once the kinks are ironed out. In the meantime, steer clear. New pleasures I've experienced with Zimbra:

  • Doesn't sync with Yahoo! mail, contacts or calendar as advertised. According to their response to my bug report, this is because of anti-DOS (denial of service) measures. So in other words, Yahoo! mail servers interpret a request to synch on the part of Zimbra as a DOS attack. Great.Update: the Zimbra team has supposedly addressed this problem in response to my bug report and this is slated to be fixed in version 1.0. If this is indicative of how they work, the final true release of Zimbra could indeed rock.
  • Then apparently Google went and changed their Contacts API right after Zimbra RC1 was cut, so that doesn't seem to work either.
  • While on the subject of gmail, Google lets me use any "send" address so I can use gmail as a client for any account, but I can't take advantage of this with Zimbra via my gmail account, so it's pretty much useless of sending from my gmail account too. Granted, that's sort of a weird request on my part and I don't think there's anything Zimbra or any client can do about it. I could explain why I want to do this, but you probably don't care.
  • And then there's the minor little problem that I could neither start nor shut down Zimbra. So I was resigned to uninstall and reinstall. Except that I couldn't do that either. Getting it off my computer is turning into quite a hassle in and of itself. If there's one thing I won't forgive in an application, it is poor uninstall functionality. If you do nothing else, make sure your application uninstalls gracefully. I can forgive everything else because if you don't mess up my system, I have nothing to risk by trying you again at version 2. If you do mess up my system and require booting into safe mode, editing the registry and crap like that, I'm not likely to try your version 2.

So in short, I've changed my review rating from "Give it a try" to "Stay far away."

Back before all that, my review read like this:]

Finally, Zimbra Desktop has arrived at Release Candidate status and features I was missing in the Beta version have been added as promised. Check out the Zimbra blog category for Zimbra Desktop for lots of other details. It now provides everything I want and includes for free features I would have been willing to pay for. For me, this is a Thunderbird killer. It could even be an Outlook killer, but since most people get Outlook for “free” (that is to say bundled with Office), I’m not sure there will be any inroads there. Anyway, some key Zimbra features:

  • “Email, contacts, calendar, and documents all in one application.” That’s not something I’ve traditionally liked, but this isn’t too bad.
  • “Syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail email, contacts and calendars.” This is huge. Try synchronization of contacts and email. Something I’ve been seeking for a while – all my contacts in a central repository that gets synched with other copies. Sort of like CVS or Subversion for contacts.
  • “Read email from any POP or IMAP email account including AOL, Hotmail or business email.” I don’t care about AOL or Hotmail, but excellent IMAP support for my main work account is key.
  • “Works on Windows, Apple, or Linux desktop computers.” Windows only here, but partly because of legacy apps like Photoshop. The more apps I have that work on multiple platforms, the freer I’ll be in the end.
  • “No limit to the size of your email storage.” Whatever. GMail and Yahoo with their GBs and GBs of storage are close enough to no limit for me.
  • It works online and offline. Bold on this one. This is huge. I often have no connection or a dialup connection. I want my address book synched with an online repository, but I want to have it available when I’m offline.
  • Multiple TODO lists. I love my Abstract Spoon ToDo list application (I need to write about that one too), so I doubt I’ll use the Zimbra feature, but it’s not bad. To replace the AS Todo list, it would need labels, priorities, due dates, hierarchy and all that. But for litttle “Call mom” type of tasks, it’s not bad.

[Update - some stuff in here is wrong - seem my comments]
I must say there are a few interface shortcomings that will hopefully be added/fixed for version 1.1 or 2. Above all, the address book allows only sorting by last name (I prefer first name sort) and you can’t see all addresses in one list (you see the As, the Bs the Cs etc). More importantly for some, it effectively runs as a sort of daemon in the background and then has a front end that launches on demand. Currently, it shares most of the code of the full Zimbra server, which means that it eats up memory, as in the daemon takes up 100MB when it’s just sitting there checking to see if you have any new mail. You are effectively running a server. If your computer is at all short on memory, this is not for you. The official word from Yahoo! is that they will first make Zimbra Desktop feature complete and then work on optimizing the runtimes. Personally, I think this is good practice — prototype first, then scale/optimize later. You could consider this a prototype, but damn inefficient. For me, my machine has plenty of memory and I would rather have an email client I don’t hate than an extra 100MB of memory, but that will depend a lot on your machine (I currently have Photoshop, Firefox, Word, Canon Scangear, Skype, iTunes, WAMP Server, Workrave, Abstract Spoon ToDo List and more running without problems, so Zimbra’s resource usage doesn’t bother me a lot).

I’m not sure yet how well address book synch works and whether or not it’s true two-way sync. For me the beta client was the most stable client I’ve had since Eudora and the Release Candidate seems solid too.

Unlike Thunderbird, you really can manage a Gmail account with Zimbra. For example, if I “move” a message to a Label in Zimbra (drag the message to a label), it automatically labels the message and archives it, so it takes it out of your inbox. At least for my part, that’s how I would like a desktop client to work with Gmail. I’m still new to Zimbra, but in my quest of a solution that does not crash, it’s running neck and neck with GMail offline. I’ve never cared for GMail, but with Gears it’s fast and that was my main complaint before. The main issue with GMail offline, is that you don’t have access to your address book. Since I’m offline a lot and use the address book for phone numbers and such, that’s a huge downside to Gmail Offline. I know they’ll probably have it within a year, but Zimbra has it now.

For anyone still with me, here’s a run down of what I’ve tried and why I don’t like them:

  • Lately I’ve been experimenting with GMail offline, but it has some issues. Most significantly, you don’t have access to your address book when you’re offline. As I just mentioned, that’s a big negative for me. Also, there are interface issues. I want to delete a message and then immediately see the next one, not be taken back to the damn message list every time. I hate this. I have found a way to sort of delete and go next in GMail, but it takes a lot more than the one click that it should. Also, there’s no built-in way to see unlabeled emails. I built a custom search and shortcut to show unlabeled Gmail messages in one click but this should be built in.
  • Thunderbird. I’ve been a Thunderbird user since version 0.4 or so and for me it has just gotten more and more unstable. I finally gave up on Thunderbird 2 crashing constantly and went to Shredder, the beta of Thunderbird 3, but that crashes at least as often. You can get some rudimentary synchronization between Gmail and yout Thunderbird contacts using Zindus, but it kept overwriting my data in funny ways and I lost a fair bit of stuff in my address book. Also, since Thunderbird and Gmail contacts use quite a different format (address is all one field in Gmail whereas it’s broken out into street, city, state, etc in Thunderbird. So that causes certain undesired effects. This was a “lesser of all evils” solution, but I’ve never really liked it.
  • Outlook Express used to come with Windows. It set all-time standard for instability, so no go there, plus it’s now horribly outdated. No synchronization either.
  • Windows Live Desktop Mail Client comes with Vista and it was never to my liking, also had funny stability issues and didn’t have synchronization with an online address book. Also, I just never really liked the interface.
  • Outlook had no real advantages over Outlook Express if you don’t want calendaring and, though I do, I hate the way Outlook does reminders. Also, unless you pony up for an Exchange account, no synch between computers or online accounts. More annoyance than I could handle. Also, it’s rather bloated.
  • PocoMail. A friend swears by this, but no or inadequate IMAP support. So scratch that.
  • Zimbra Beta 1. Promising, but didn’t solve the synchronization problem and I didn’t like the interface that much.

I must say, it pains me to see the issues that Yahoo! is having, because I think they have some great products like Zimbra and I just hope that if Yahoo! gets sold, the buyer does good things with the best of Yahoo!

Anyway, if you feel like your current email client just isn’t doing it for you, Zimbra is worth a look.

Tagged with: • • • • • •

Filed under: Software and Computing • Web Fun

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!