We’ve aimed to blur the line between a Ajax web-client and a conventional desktop application, and this release is a leap towards reaching that goal. If you’re just joining us here’s the best part: It’s an offline capable client so you can take your data with you whenever you don’t have internet access - then sync any type of interaction that you can do in normal webmail access when you get connected again. So many cool new things I don’t know where to begin - the Zimbra Desktop team has been very busy since Beta 2.
They’re here, and your tasks, documents, & briefcase items can now follow you wherever you may roam. If you’re already using Zimbra Desktop against a Zimbra Collaboration Suite server these will show up on next edit or item move via delta sync - while a full account sync or reset will pull in prior items. Personally, having briefcase items available offline is a major plus - as offline calendaring using the same AJAX web-client interface has already long since won me over.
Yahoo! Mail users rejoice - There’s now IMAP access through Zimbra Desktop to all free, plus, and business accounts. You didn’t read that wrong. Normally only Plus accounts have POP access, but as a perk when using Zimbra Desktop the mail is synced via IMAP; which is a much better protocol for keeping your mail organized - and yes it’s available to free accounts as well. Hook-up your @yahoo.com account or go grab one of the new @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com addresses. (Note that some apps don’t sync to Yahoo! servers yet so the data is local.)
Mailto: link handler - For Mac and Windows protocol handlers allow you to click on a mailto: link in any browser, and it will bring-up Zimbra Desktop’s composer with a javascript call. If Prism is not already running, it will start the web-app as well with a url call, then pop up compose. We don’t want to be accidentally invasive, so to turn this feature on you’ll have to check the box in global preferences to make it the default mail client on your computer.
Icon badging - To keep you informed, we now display the total number of unread messages across all-inboxes; in the dock icon for Mac and on Windows there’s now a tray icon, which changes to a new mail image if there are unread messages.
Mac & Windows users may just decide to toss out their toasters, because we now have mail & appointment notifications built-in. (Zimbra Toaster still serves as a lightweight new-mail checker with quick flag and delete features. There’s also some community contributed Linux solutions like Zimbra Notify.)
Zimbra Desktop on Windows now takes advantage of the native tray icon bubbles and on Mac of course we use Growl. (You need to install Growl separately which is quite straightforward.) You’ll also need to enable “show pop-up notification” under both Mail and Calendar tabs in preferences, since by default notifications are turned off.
The latest versions of Zimbra Collaboration Suite have also introduced browser title & favicon flashing, mail & account tab highlighting, as well as sound notifications - which have been ported to Beta 3 as well. So there’s no excuse for not noticing a new mail if you’re at your computer. Ok, we can still think of a few excuses - but note that the pop-up notifications are per account settings; so you can have some accounts on and some accounts off if you should need to ‘forget about’ that important meetingIn-case you’ve never tried Zimbra Desktop, or are still using an Alpha, and never tried it out during Beta 1 or when we served-up Beta 2: There’s also easy setup menus for setting up Zimbra Server, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, AOL, or any other IMAP/POP accounts you want to use. For Beta 3 we’ve thrown out JavaMail and wrote a brand-new robust IMAP/POP client-engine from scratch.
To get you up and running when you need it, there’s now an auto-start service. During launch of the Prism web-app a check is run to see if the background service is running - if not, it’s automatically started. This works on all 3 platforms, and proves especially useful on Linux since the service doesn’t automatically start after reboot. (See this forum thread for ways to do that.) There’s also an animated splash screen during launch of Prism so you know it’s working on bringing-up the background process.
Icon menus - On the Mac dock icon and Windows tray icon, we now have right-click menu items to check for updates and shutdown the background service.
Windows minimize to tray - Clicking on the “X” now only minimizes prism window to tray. To quit prism, right click the tray icon and choose “Quit”.
This release makes Zimbra Desktop available to a quarter-billion Yahoo! users with support for 20+ languages. The default theme is a revamped Yahoo! skin to help keep the interface familiar as it spreads to those millions of users. Hope you enjoy, and as we advance upon a GA release: Thanks to the Zimbra Community for all your bug corrections and feature requests so far. The Mozilla team developed a few of these new Prism features from scratch just for us, you can read more about some of them here. But stay tuned, we’re gonna have a closer look under the hood to see how we implemented these features and the inner workings of Prism + Zimbra Desktop in a future blog post.
If it’s not available to you via auto-update yet, you haven’t been building from source, or are even just discovering it for the first time, you can download it here for Mac, Windows, & Linux.
Have an idea for Zimbra Desktop or just want a tweak built upon these new components? We’re interested in hearing your feedback on it below or over in the Community Forums. A bunch of us are at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon this week - so drop in around booths 415 & 519 if you’re there.
on July 24th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Awesome! Well done the Zimbra team. Innovative and highly appreciated.
on July 24th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Great work guys!
After setting the default theme back to “sand” instead of Yahoo, (could that setting not be read from my account btw?) I’m still left with a search bar that uses Yahoo search. Can that be changed to another search or turned off?
Other then that Beautifull work! Very pleased with the briefcase
on July 24th, 2008 at 8:34 am
I’m trying to use zimbra desktop with my yahoo account.
com.zimbra.cs.mailclient.CommandFailedException: LOGIN failed: LOGIN failure. Invalid username or password, or invalid access
Whats the reason ?
on July 24th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I guess this question might not be appropriate for here…
But why is Yahoo IMAP limited to a few apps? Why doesn’t it use standard IMAP authentication?
on July 24th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
I would love to see an Apple iPhone application for e-mail that would unite e-mail in an easy-to-use manner
on July 24th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Any ETA on supporting shared calendars/addressbooks in it?
on July 24th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
@MeneM If I remember right the attribute in question is like zimbraFeatureWebSearch or zimbraFeatureWebSearchEnabled.
Actually the theme setting is intentionally not synced-
For one, users may not want to have the same skin on web and desktop (just for preference reasons or because they want to visually differentiate which client they’re using). But the other, more technical issue is that a user may have skins installed on Desktop that aren’t available on their web access and vice versa…which would cause the one that didn’t have the selected skin to keep defaulting to ’sand’ (actually the new ZCS default is now ‘beach’ aka ’sand’ with a splash of blue) which may not be what the user wants at all.
I use Zimbra Desktop to develop skins rather than throwing up an entire ZCS server - if you don’t know where to start, just tweak an existing one in your zdesktop/jetty/webapps/zimbra/skins folder. See this for possibilities: http://files.zimbra.com/docs/skins/index.html
@MercHead Are you still having difficulty/did you type the full @domain part? Take further troubleshooting issues to http://www.zimbra.com/forums/zimbra-desktop/ and we’ll help you out.
@Jono Yup the special auth token/mechanism is limited for multitude of reasons I won’t go into here; but if I had to guess based on common practices, general IMAP access will probably be available to Plus accounts first when rolled out someday.
@Counsel For NE we do have Zimbra MobileSync support for the iPhone 2.0 firmware http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/07/zimbra-mobile-for-iphone.html which allows for integration with the built-in mail, contact, calendaring (and appointment reminders) but yes we could consider an iPhone App as well using the SDK sometime, or maybe the community will make one!
@Frank This may be a little further out, but you can keep an eye on (and vote for!) this RFE: http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19182
on July 25th, 2008 at 3:57 am
But no syncing of Yahoo Address Book contacts? What good is an email client if contact information isn’t built-in?
on July 25th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Hope you are heading fast towards 1.0. Can’t wait for it!
Great release.
on July 25th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
@BJ Remember this is a port of the server, so all of the services of course sync with ZCS - try out the hosted demo and you may just become a convert: http://www.zimbra.com/products/hosted_demo.php
We do have Yahoo integration planned as I mentioned above “(Note that some apps don’t sync to Yahoo! servers yet so the data is local.)” Yahoo IMAP access through Zimbra Desktop to all free accounts was the first step that we’ve added since Beta 1’s Plus IMAP access.
Several methods to do so will become available shortly (from both Zimbra & Yahoo! ends of the spectrum) since those are internal RFE’s I’ve created http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=30249 for you to watch & vote on (though it obviously has strategic value so we do in-fact plan to implement it). Zimbra is Open Source and we’re very pleased to see more Yahoo! members join our community. To understand how you can shape the future of what Zimbra is see: http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2007/02/open-source-product-management-how-do-features-get-into-zimbra.html
In the meantime you can at least import most of your Yahoo contacts:
http://address.mail.yahoo.com/?1&VPC=import_export (or similar URL) > choose Yahoo! CSV (or Microsoft Outlook)
Then open Zimbra Desktop > Preferences Tab > Address Book Tab > Import CSV.
As IM contacts aren’t imported easily without field re-arrange I’ve filed http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=30258
Take further troubleshooting replies to http://www.zimbra.com/forums/zimbra-desktop/ and we’ll help you out.
on August 2nd, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I’ve been playing with as many features of Zimbra as possible since I installed it about three hours ago, and so far I am really pleased with the application. I was able to install two Yahoo accounts and a Gmail account to it with ease. They all function well, and I can hop from one account to the other in a one-click jiffy.
I also like the drag-images-into-attachments feature, much better than Yahoo!s old approach. I even dragged multiple images at the same time.
There are too many features for me to talk about other than to say once again that I am pleased do far with Zimbra.
No, I don’t work for Zimbra.
Stan Kossen
on August 23rd, 2008 at 4:01 am
guys this is a total home run…def up to zimbra standards!!
some obvious tuning points as you go to GA:
– font size support, at least for the message preview pane
– a way to exclude certain folders from sync (didn’t see any options for it)
– was getting RPC memory errors with very large mboxes
wonderful work!!!
on September 19th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I am starting up with a new Yahoo account. I have downloaded Zimbra and I am confused. Will Zimbra replicate all my Yahoo data offline. I find Tasks and calendars different in Yahoo online and Zimbra
Notes is absent from Zimbra
Where should i start, Online or Zimbra.
on October 13th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Love the client. Only one thing bothers me about it. It would be nice to not have to scroll through the header to view attachments. It’d be nice to have the attachments show above the header or at the bottom of the screen.
Other than that, keep up the great work.
on October 15th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Love it but…
- contact sync with Yahoo and Gmail would be great
- changing the “new message” noise would be handy
- a preference for the folder view (always conversation or always message view) would be very helpful