Zimbra, Again.

I decided to check out Zimbra to see if VMware pushed some of the features that make the product interesting into the open source edition.  They haven't, but I now have a VMware box with enough RAM to make it happy, so I decided to switch.  Now I need to do something with the former mail VM running on one of the XenServer pools at work.

What has changed with the product?  Actually, quite a few things.  Most obvious, VMware has ensured VMware is mentioned everywhere they can possibly mention  VMware is the company that produces products made by VMware and while you're at it, VMware.  Next up, I'm pretty sure it used to run Tomcat, while now it runs Jetty.  While I haven't thrown 300,000 messages at it, so far it is snappier.  Then again, that could be a feature of the underlying hardware.  It is still the king of all web-based email interfaces.  If that is your primary method of accessing mail and you run your own mail server and have the RAM to spare, it is silly to not run it.

There are some issues apparent from the start.  The install process is still painfully slow for something distributed as RPMs.  It still doesn't recognize CentOS as a perfectly suitable substitute for RHEL.  The SSL certificate installer is thoroughly broken, at least when trying to install a GoDaddy cert.  The other two issues with VMware Zimbra is that it isn't Cyrus.  Allow me to clarify.  Cyrus stores mail on disk in such a way that in a worst case scenario, where all metadata about the mailbox is unrecoverable, it is possible to ensure mail is in the right mailbox by the very nature that it maps an IMAP folder to a directory on disk.  Zimbra doesn't do that.  I have no idea what it does, but it certainly isn't that.  Cyrus has the best implementation of the Sieve filtering language on the face of the planet.  Zimbra has an 80% solution that is almost as good.