In late Sept. 2007, I ditched Outlook for good and switched to Zimbra. My experience with Zimbra has been great -- exceptionally stable, wonderful user experience and every feature I have ever wanted in a webmail client. That was until v5.0x was released. It had even cooler features and I decided to take the plunge.

Bad move...after spending almost a whole day in aggregate, my smooth running Zimbra server on a Linode VPS is toast. I mean the data is all there, but I cannot get the server to work right. I have spent lots of time on the Zimbra wiki and forums, scoured the documentation and tried lots of fixes -- bottom line, the new webserver Jetty that replaces Tomcat just does not work. It basically responds to requests, but does nothing...for infinity. I have done upgrade installs, clean installs, clean installs on a clean server...no dice...it just won't work.

Today, I finally admitted defeat...Zimbra has lost some of its lustre (but only on the server side). For the first time ever, I have my mail hosted on a server that I do not control. When I first started my Zimbra experience, I found 01.com to be the best Zimbra host out there, so today I setup all the family email accounts on 01.com.

So far the experience has been pretty decent. Everything works as advertised (although it's a bit sluggish...but maybe that's because I'm coming from a VPS). The only area I was underwhelmed by was support...it took several hours to get a couple of domain aliases added to my account...a pretty simple operation. But so far, so good.

Now, all I have to do is figure out how to get the message store from my server into my 01 Zimbra account.

[Update]

The VPS on Linode has a cool feature that allows you to purchase more memory for your server on-demand. On a whim, I did this and presto...my Zimbra server was back to normal operational status. I was running it on 1Gb, while the minimum requirements for Zimbra v5.0 appear to be 2Gb. After doing some research I found that this is only for the default settings. By making config. changes for how much the Java VM and MySQL consume, you can run it on 1.5Gb.

Now, I have all my email from my Linode transferred to my 01.com Zimbra mailbox (using IMAP). Even though I like the thought of having complete control on my mail, this experience has convinced me that for something as critical as email, delegating backups, upgrades and compatibility to a provider is a better option. I have been using 01.com's service for over a month now and am a happy customer. I even signed-up for the Blackberry OTA sync of emails, calendar, addressbook and tasks that they provide. It works great.

Glad to be enjoying Zimbra once again. The lustre is back.

After having successfully weaned myself completely off Outlook, I decided that Internet Explorer was a good candidate to also stop using. Realistically, I doubt I can ever completely stop using IE seeing that I have develop web software and need to test with it, but I can certainly choose to not use it for everyday browsing. For two weeks now, my default browser has been Firefox. And I am loving it.

In addition to not crashing as often when I have 15-20 tabs open, the single most compelling feature for me is Firefox's "Restore session?" dialog when you startup the browser after a not-so-clean shutdown of the computer. I love the fact that without doing anything, Firefox remembers all the tabs I had open when the event that caused my computer to "shutdown unexpectedly" occurred and brings up the browser exactly the way I had it. I am sure IE has a similar feature that I can enable after clicking around through a few dialogs, but the beauty of the Firefox solution is that I had to do nothing.

There are other things I like about Firefox, such as the pretty source code and its color-coded search, overall stability and adherence to standards, etc., but the "Restore session" feature is my favorite. 

It is now one month since I started using Zimbra, a free, Open Source mail server. I previously used Thunderbird, then started using Outlook in order to handle calendaring with work colleagues. I have hated the Outlook experience every step of the way. Here are some of the problems:

• Periodically need to shut-down and restart the app to get new mail
• Regular White Screen of Death situations where the app just goes white and does who-knows-what before returning control
• Lousy feed handling (I use Google Reader now and it is fantastic)
• Problems keeping Internet calendar sync'd
• S-L-O-W
  

Outlook is probably good if you have one or two email accounts, but when you are managing more accounts and mixing IMAP/POP, Outlook just is not up for the task. I got totally fed-up with the whole situation a month ago, and started searching for an alternative. More specifically, I looked for a web-based alternative that so closely resembled a desktop client, that you would not be able to tell the difference. I found many Windows mail servers but all of them had crappy webmail clients and the ones that were crappy were too pricey.

When I saw the Zimbra demo, I knew my search was over. One big problem -- it runs on Linux. I saw this as an opportunity to keep up my skills on the Linux platform. I got a cheap Ubuntu dedicated virtual server at Linode.com, downloaded and installed Zimbra and a few hiccups later, I am in email Utopia. All my work and personal email, in one location, web-based with sharing of Address Books, Calendar, Documents with other family members, full-support for email identities. To be honest, I did not need to get the virtual server...I found an exceptional hosted service at 01.com that is a pretty good deal, however I have always liked to have full access to my mail server and I did not want to lose this.

So far, things have been great. I don't think I am ever going back to Outlook or any other Windows client. The speed, responsiveness and features (that matter) of the Zimbra web client rival and exceed those of most Windows client (definitely better than Outlook). Drag-and-drop, context menus, alerts...everything just works.

I look forward to seeing what innovative things happen with Zimbra now that Yahoo! has purchased it.