Zimbra is a mail client you don’t deserve

We’ve recently swithch our mail client to use Zimbra, from the epynomous company (am I using that word correctly?) Full of ajax-y goodness, drag and drop, smart filtering, and something the’re calling “zimlets”, Zimbra is really one hell of a mail server and web-based client.

We had been searching for a replacement for our less-than-stellar mail service provider, who often got blacklisted for his other clients or was losing harddrives or something. Not too good to risk the main comm channel for the company. Best to bring this in-house we thought, where the *****-ups could be home grown and I could have someone to yell at in person.

There was no way in Hell I was going to go with MS Exchange. The pricing, the licencing, the overall goofiness wasn’t going to make it possible. “Open source, dangit”– that’s the motto around here.

We looked at Open-Xchange. We looked long and hard. We even went to the trouble of installing it on a test server and– well– the installation is not the selling point with open xchange.

Enter Zimbra. Introduced very early in their alpha stage through a mutual friend, my sysadmin and I had a conference with their engineers. Toward the end of the call I found out that I was, in fact, talking to the CEO and lead engineer– heh, cool! But that isnt what sold us. The zimlets, the zimlets are the magick. Zimlets are these little bot-like filtering spiders that scan through the text of any mail message and look for special, defined terms, like “tomorrow” or “Thursday” , “134 Sycamore Street”or “Order #4561242″. These terms are then highlighted, and with a siumple mouseover, will produce deeper information: your schedule for that day, a map to an address in a little pop-up window, or the status of a given order drawn from your ERP.

Right sexy, that is all I thought. When my sysadmin, who is the usual jaded quake4 burned out, ive-seen-everything type was agog at the functionality he saw in the demo, I knew that we had found our new mail server.

We are working on a zimlet of our own that will return someone’s tetongravityresearch forum score when you mouseover their name. Just kidding– but that would be kinda cool…