Zimbra - Presentation, example of an "anonymous mailing list"

Hello, today we are going to talk about Zimbra. This post is the result of my overall satisfaction with it - I hope it won't be considered as an attempt to advertise for them hoping for special favours in return. People who know me know I really like their product, and I believe the people there really deserve some praising.

Introduction

So, what is Zimbra? Zimbra is a complete, multi-platform, easy to install, scalable mail and collaboration software. It is based on opensource software, including mysql, jetty, mailman, spamassassin, postfix, Java, amavis, openldap .. Zimbra bundles all these together, and includes a nice web-2.0-ish web interface to manage everything. Among the features you will find:

• Antivirus/Antispam
• Shared calendars
• Shared task lists
• An integrated jabber server
• A very good and fast search (everything is indexed)
• Shared email folders
• Tags for emails
• Integration with LDAP/Active Directory
• Static HTML and mobile phone interfaces
• POP(s) and IMAP(s) access

Zimbra at OA

The good

At Oxford Archaeology we have gradually moved over the past year from Exchange to Zimbra ZCS 4, and then 5. This involved the transfer of 350 people's mailbox, PSTs, their training, mailing lists, and so on. Thanks to the Exchange import and PST import tools, this went rather smoothly. I just had to write some homemade awk scripts to bulk-import the users and mailing lists, but I think this is now a feature of Zimbra 5.

Before, people in our main offices in Oxford would use Outlook, people in our branch offices Outlook Web access (which really sucked, to be fair, and only worked properly in internet explorer). Now people would access their email in the same way, from the main office, a branch office, or from home; and this is a huge step forward.

On a whole, I must say I am very impressed by their web interface and the features it proposes (you can give it a go here, just press skip registration). More than the product itself, I really like the way the project is managed. Several staff spend time on the forums and provide free support to non paying customers; this is great. The bugzilla is public, and as a customer you can join a support ticket to a bug/feature request, therefore giving it more weight. The support is quick, and even with the lowest level of support you are entitled for 24/7 phone support in case of major breakdown. The quality insurance of the product is very good; bugs do happen, but you can usually live with them, and if serious they are treated with the appropriate speed.

The bad... and the ugly

My biggest concern right now is the fact that Zimbra has been bought by Yahoo. Things have got a lot worse since that happened. Yahoo started over-branding the zimbra interface with their crappy logos, pushed an ugly yahoo search nobody wanted, installed yahoo zimlets by default. The Zimbra Desktop is now Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. The previous conception was that Zimbra would never propose Zimbra hosting, and instead let a pool of partners propose their own solutions instead; these have all been screwed now.

Then it makes me unsure about the free will of the developers, who now uses the YUI libs for ajax development; was this because it was the best option? To this, add the shadow of a purchase by microsoft or AOL - who may not have the best interest in keeping it running as it is. Finally, Zimbra licensing sucks (even the opensource is ad-licensed - you have to keep the original logo). I really hope Yahoo will understand that it is a bad idea to use paid-for Zimbra customers to push their unsuccessful products. That was for the ugly part of Zimbra.Zimbra's power by the example: an anonymous mailing list

Ok let me define what I mean by "anonymous" mailing list. I had the request recently to create a new email address. Several people should be able to read the emails sent to that email address, and to reply to these emails. Mail sent as a reply should appear to be coming from that "mailing list" and never display nor contain the name of the actual sender.

How it used to work

This used to be implemented as a full account, with a password shared among all the person who would have to use it. This is bad because:

• Well, first I need to pay for a new account (you pay for a certain number of mailboxes).
• Someone who would leave the company in bad terms would still be able to log into it, unless you change the password every time someone leaves (regarding the number of mailing lists, this is not really possible).
• The user needs to log into two different mailboxes, and remember more passwords.

The Zimbra way

Let me try to explain how you could do this with Zimbra. Good luck setting this up without weeks of hassle on any other system . This is just ONE way to do this and may not be the best; I found it to be quite flexible.

First, let's create a new user account, which we will call "mailinglists@domain". Let's say the address of the mailing list we want to create is anon@domain. We create an alias "anon@domain" for the mailing list mailinglist@domain.

We do not define a password for the user account mailinglists@domain - and use the admin interface to "su -" into it. In that account, we create a new folder called "anon". We then create a new filter to file any incoming email, addressed to anon@domain, into the folder "anon".

We then right click on that folder, and select "share with". Now you add all the persons that should be able to read these emails.

This is for the first step; now the persons who are able to read these emails need to be able to reply using anon@domain as sender. In the admin interface, go to the profile of a user that should be able to send emails as anon@domain; go to the preferences tab, and "Sending mail" section, at "Allow sending mail only from these " add "anon@domain".

Then, use the admin interface to "su -" to the user account, and go into the preferences tab, accounts sub-tab. Select "Add new Persona", and configure it like this:

Now save. You're done! When sending an email, the user will have a new drop-down list that will allow him to select with which address he wants to send. Following this method will allow you to use only a single zimbra license for all mailing lists, allow any new person to have access to all the archives, and not tie the mailing list to any particular account.

Zimbra and Ubuntu

Ubuntu has been a supported platform for Zimbra since Ubuntu 6.06. Ubuntu 8.04 has become fully supported as well a few months after the release of 8.04 (right, we pushed a bit :P). We believe Ubuntu 8.04 is a platform of choice for Zimbra - and hope Zimbra will continue to support it in the future.

Edit: title typo fixed