Abandoning Zimbra Desktop for something better

[Lucinda]

I remember maybe four years ago when Zimbra had an installer that crashed. When they partnered with VMware I thought that the vmware people would do a good job, dust the bugs off and make a terrific all-purpose client for mail and groupware.

I cannot be more disgusted; I have installed v2 and v7 (7.1.4, yes, the latest, phoenix, don't bother) and I have never seen such disastrous piece of crap. Zimbra Desktop makes Microsoft software looks snappy, lean, configurable and generally user friendly and not the crap that it itself is. I have never seen such bloated, disgraceful, slow, infuriating piece of shit. I installed them (not at the same time, eh) on a clean, formerly happy and fast dual core machine, with 1 GB of RAM. They ate all of the memory, reduced the computer to a 486 and let me look at one email every 4 seconds. Wonderful. The synchronization is pure evil: slow beyond reason, no information about progress, no ETA, taking all of the resources with it. I left it on overnight and it took 16 hours for one (1) measly GB of email in 15,000 files. You've got to be kidding me. Zimbra makes thunderbird look good. I won't go on because, as others and myself have noted, no one wants to listen. I don't know what is VMware doing here when the rest of their software is world class.

To the 'developers' of this failure: it's small and fast that people like, the perverts, yes, would you believe it. Enormous, slow, stupid and bloated beyond measure is no good.

[stryvya]

Nice one Lucinda, have just un-installed after 2 weeks of trying and still unable to get it to work properly?
Had to open a Yahoo account (another waste of space) to be able to open Address Book and then for Yahoo to repeatedly fail to send, so back to Thunderbirds for me

[zddr]

Which OS you are running Lucinda? The limited amount of RAM seems to be the problem. For example, you can't even run Windows 7 with less than 2 GB of RAM these days. (and 2GB is only the minimum).

[medicaldiamonds]

Hi Lucinda, I can understand your frustration. I learned many unfortunate things the hard way using Zimbra Desktop. I have been using ZD for almost 3 years now ever since I converted from Windows to Linux o/s completely. At the time, ZD version 2.X was highly praised and was the only feature rich email for Linux so I went for it. It actually worked quite well including all the features. ZD 2.x and Ubuntu 10.04 at the time was the perfect combo email client/linux os...until ZD 7.X came out. Since then I've had issues with ZD and became active here on the forum asking questions. Honestly, I guess it is the very reason why i'm active on this forum: because i'm having these issues otherwise I'd just be sitting happily at my desk if my ZD was humming perfectly. Oh well...

[nrc]

ZD is an interesting technology excercise - essentially pulling a web app down into the client. Unfortunately there are problems with that and VMware doesn't seem motivated to solve them since that's not their direction. The latest ZCS release notes say that 7.2 is the end of the line for ZD, so I wouldn't expect that to change.

[davidkillingsworth]

We have migrated all of our users who were using Zimbra Desktop to just use Zimbra through a browser window. There isn't any difference that we have found except that the desktop takes hours/days to synch, whereas the webmail doesn't need to synch.

[medicaldiamonds]

As of today, I have officially migrated from ZD 7.1.4 GA Build 11299 to Mozilla Thunderbird 11.0.1 on Ubuntu 11.10 and couldn't be any happier. Special kudos goes to the developer and maintainer of ImportExportTools migration tool who made this migration from ZD to Thunderbird effortless! Thanks Zimbra for what once a great product (ZD Open Source and ZD). Thanks to all those who responded to my questions on the forum.