So long Cyrus, Hello Zimbra

With that in mind, it's time to look at the so called Exchange Killers.  These are networked groupware packages that allow one or more individuals to keep up with mail, schedules, todo lists, contacts, and maybe some other neat futures if they can be thrown in.  I've looked at these solutions in the past, but certain work pressures have made this worth pursuing recently and certainly gave me a fun, interesting task.

This time around, I looked at several contenders.  First up was Open Xchange.  I quickly ran away screaming.  While claiming to be open they certainly don't act like it.  While I'm sure there's an open-source solution hiding under there somewhere, I gave up after a couple of hours... I read up on the pay version's pricing scheme.  You would think a Microsoft Exchange replacement would be a tiny fraction of an actual Exchange install.  Not in this case.  Given a choice between Microsoft Exchange and the pretender, Microsoft loses on cost only by a few points, but completely wins due to the fact that it installs with two clicks.  Microsoft could make its own Exchange killer if they reduced the price of Windows Server and Exchange, and Exchange CLAs, and Outlook.  Probably won't happen.

Next up was Zarafa.  Zarafa was an excellent contender.  It's open source version is a 98% solution for a single domain.  While it has "multi company" features, they're not all that great and there's no web-based interface, and there's certainly not a way to delegate administrative responsibilities to customers.  While needed by less than five customers at work, these are Very Important customers and are served with any reasonable request at a reasonable price, which is then significantly discounted due to the fact that they're such awesome customers.  This made me quite disappointed as it had full ActiveSync capability out of the box, well, with a simple download and one-line change to Apache's httpd.conf.  The lack of a web-based admin interface and no delegated administration put this on the, "Well if nothing else works" list.  It was completely removed from the list after looking into the "multi company" feature and then ripped to shreds when SMTP AUTH came into play  Zarafa is loosely coupled to the MTA.  In other words, users of the Zarafa install can't authenticate against the SMTP server with their Zarafa credentials.  The preferred MTA, Postfix, must use an external source.  Oh, and you can't use your Zarafa passwords with some MySQL trickery as they're encoded with a one-way hash, so at best the PLAIN and LOGIN SASL mechs will work, but only if it's possible to figure out what exactly Zarafa does when mangling passwords.  It's not any of the MySQL built-in hashes, at least not without mangling. Although it is the length of a SHA-1 hash, it doesn't seem to be a SHA-1 hash of the actuall password.  I'm guessing they prepend something like "LOL SECUAR!!!1" to the password the keep the 31337 h4xx0z away.  As for the "multi company" feature, it too is tied closely to the MTA.  Accounts are assigned an email address, which may match simply the user part of any domain accepted by the system, or if multiple companies are installed it may somehow match another domain.  I didn't really make it past the point in the documentation where it said "the company part of the domain can be anything."  Goodbye Zarafa.  If only I had to manage a single domain.

I decided to give Zimbra a try once again.  Several years ago I was disappointed with quite a few of its technical decisions.  Even today I am not 100% thrilled with the fact that I need at least 1GB of ram for a lightly loaded install.  Then again, I do get a web-based groupware system with shareable folders, calendars, documents, wikis, address books, and a few other nice things.  There are applets for the web interface, dubbed zimlets, that offer additional, often very useful, functionality.  Multiple domains aren't a problem.  Full domain aliases aren't a problem.  In fact, it's tough to find a problem with Zimbra.

Where Zimbra falls apart isn't in the features.  It is very featured, and 99% of the features are rock solid.  It breaks only when you do something silly.  On my personal install, I certainly did something silly, and now I face some minor breakage which will be fixed with the next release that updates a few files and database tables here and there.  If you ever need to halt an install, even if it's in the "everything seems to be complete" stage but it's still hanging on for a minute or two, walk away and get some coffee.  It's not really finished.  Now on to the real problem: pricing.  I have ten mailboxes, eight of which are my own.  Ultimately I can consolidate those into a single account using aliases and Zimbra's handy filter facility that will be very familiar to anybody that has used a GUI interface to Sieve.  The number of accounts isn't a problem.  Where the problem really comes into the plays is that you pay by the year, and it's $25 or $35 per mailbox depending on feature set, i.e. do you want an Outlook or Apple iSync connector or not?  To make matters worse, they sell mailboxes in blocks of 25, bringing to cost to $625 or $825 per year.  Then comes mobile access.  While the web interface is excellent on mobile devices, slow "3G" web access doesn't cut it.  I need my ActiveSync and I need it now.  That's another $500 per year if you have 25 or 50 mailboxes, or $1000 for 75 mailboxes or more.  The $1000 is actually pretty reasonable if you have 500 accounts, but the $500 isn't so good if you have a mere 25 accounts, even if you do qualify for the 50% discount for being a non-profit, which I can only hope extends to private individuals who simply want a full-featured mail system.  Granted, in my personal setup I don't need delegated administration like we would at work, so the community edition suits my needs perfectly EXCEPT FOR MOBILE SYNCING.  I'm not paying $150/yr times two or three family and friends to some other company to host my mail and mobile sync cabaility simply because I can't pay simply $500/year for a feature rather than $875 plus the $500 for features I don't need.  Did I mention the licensing is per year?  Sure, it gives the purchaser access to upgrades, but full price each and every year?!

To add insult to injury, they have what's called Zimbra Collaboration Suite on-site Starter Edition, available for $399.  Oh you better believe there's a catch.  Yes, you get admin delegation, you get the connectors, and that's it.  No support, no nothing.  You can't add more users than your included fifteen.  You can't purchase add-on products like Mobility or the Archiving and Discovery .  To do that, you have to forget about the $399 you just paid and pony up another $875 to get ten more users and the privilege to pay them more money for a great feature that shouldn't cost $20 per mailbox!

After looking at the published pricing, I'm not sure we could afford it at work unless they make the terms VERY generous, and hopefully I can get them to throw a bone my way for making them some significant cash, should we go with it at work.

With that rant complete, I have to admit I've switched my email to Zimbra 100%.  Even with the hassle of not being able to sync contacts with the iPhone in a simple manner (read: I just spent three days playing with this, I'm not going to spend another minute fiddling with something that should be a base feature), and the fact that the phone polls the IMAP folder once every 15 minutes, and the fact that calendaring just doesn't work like magic, I still switched.  The fact that it has a decent webmail app, the fact that it has a fully-featured Exchange-killer implemented with a web interface, is enough to make it my new standard.  Unless Zimbra does something wholly stupid, I'm sticking with it, and I'm going to push it at work.