[SLL] Post-Path Email server

[Mark Ballinger]

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 7:18 PM, Derek Simkowiak <dereks at realloc.net> wrote:
>
>   I ran Zimbra on my personal email server for a few months.  I had a
> negative experience.  It uses a lot of Java on the backend (JSPs), and a lot
> of (unoptimized?) AJAX and Javascript on the front-end web client, and it is
> very, very slow.

I converted two sites to the Community version of Zimbra recently.
Site one has been a very successful transition and site two, not so
much.

Site one had half its users running Outlook 2007 connecting with imap
to a dovecot server, and the other half going in with squirrelmail.  I
installed Zimbra on an otherwise unused Debian etch box and it has
been a dream.  The Outlookers switched imap servers with almost no
issues and the webmail nuts are extremely happy.  Squirrelmail was
just not doing it for them.

The only issue with Outlook was some settings to prevent disconnects,
and they were used to Trash folders being cleared on logout, so I just
set Zimbra to clear them once a day.  Zimbra's spam tagging has been
wonderful for them.

Site two was Outlook 2000/Exchange 2000 with a couple of users who
used to be on Outlook Web Access.  OWA was such a dog that I convinced
them many months ago to get gmail accounts and they've been happy ever
since.

The Outlook 2000-ers are less happy.  In general they've adapted.  The
Exchange server is way old and needs to be manually reset whenever
Microsoft pushes a reboot-necessary update to it.  It also had one
dead drive on the array so, blah blah blah, I told everyone it was not
safe to keep their mail on it.  All of the Outlookers now use Zimbra
web mail as Outlook 2000 has minimally functional IMAP and they're not
ready to upgrade to Office 2007 yet.

The top issues that Outlookers have are:

Reminders: Outlook has a better system for posting notes to oneself.
Spell check: with IE7 the webmail text boxes don't spell check
automagically and don't cut-n-paste.  Firefox would fix that, but the
users are stubborn.
No return receipt flag on send: they love this.  Zimbra doesn't.
Slowness: a couple of people are on dog-slow Windows 2000 machines and
the AJAX is painful.  For everybody else, especially Firefox users
it's fine.
Slowness: the server is running in a VMware window on a server that
also is used for shell database.  When Zimbra fire up amavis the CPU
goes to 98%
One user does a lot of "Send in Email" right clicky in windows, which
doesn't work in a web client.  So, I installed Thunderbird for her and
it's only used to support "Send in Email".
General Unfamiliarity: every other complaint is just that "it's new".

Me, I love Zimbra in both places.  User management is way nicer.  It's
missing a few reports that I like getting from postfix but that's
okay.  Getting off Exchange at site two was huge.  I will probably go
for the paid version of Zimbra over the summer.

The paid version would add MAPI, technical support and clients on a
pile of cellphones.  Our iPhone user thinks Zimbra is nifty but our
MotoQ guy can't get it to work with straight up imap.