Why is Zimbra so buggy?

[edwin.arneson]

Originally Posted by Bill Brock

Of all the paid mailboxes bragged about I wonder how many are hard core business mail boxes and how many are simply used for E-mail.

A number of people here only forward their e-mail messages to another e-mail system of their choice (e.g. Gmail).

[Matt Rhoades]

Originally Posted by nrc

Reformatting isn't going to get any of these resolved unless someone bothers to enter them in bugzilla.

Agreed. The best way to get bugs fixed in the Zimbra product is to file them at Bugzilla Main Page . I also encourage the community to vote on bugs that are important.

A couple of Zimbra QA engineers looked through the list of bugs and filed these:

http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/buglist.cgi?chfield=[Bug%20creation]&chfieldfrom=2009-04-29&chfieldto=2009-05-01&field0-0-0=reporter&field0-0-1=reporter&type0-0-0=substring&type0-0-1=substring&value0-0-0=krishnakumar&value0-0-1=jitesh

However, some of the listed bugs were duplicates, some were not reproducible, some needed more details, some were working as designed. Those bugs were not filed.

As everyone has stated on this thread, if you find a bug, post it to the Zimbra bugzilla site rather than the forums. To increase the likelihood of your bug being processed, include clear steps to reproduce, describe the behavior that you expect to see, and include applicable message data as attachments (e.g. MIME sample, ICS sample, CSV, server exception, server SOAP trace)

[fcash]

Originally Posted by edwin.arneson

I'm not sure to what you are referring. Each numbered item is one or more related issues in 1 paragraph. Written in English and properly punctuated; though sometimes correct grammar is sacrificed for brevity. (Not guaranteed to be error free since, like Zimbra, there's been no QA. )

Each post shows up as one big blob of run-together text. There's no separation of paragraphs. No delineation between items. I was going to read through them, but couldn't. It seems others could, so the point is moot.

But in the future, adding proper paragraph spacing would go a long way to making things easier for others to read.

[edwin.arneson]

Oh, what fun. So I thought I'd try the newly GA Zimbra Desktop to see if it worked better then the Advanced client. It lasted about 5 minutes. I right-clicked on an e-mail message and selected "Show Original." Had I been using the Advanced client, I could have printed it. Using Zimbra Desktop I can't (of course copy/paste is a work-around).

I thought I'd put this in Bugzilla like everyone recommends, but after doing a couple of searches, Bugzilla seems to have gone away. So I'm typing here right now instead of Bugzilla.

[ewilen]

After 2.5 decades of Mac usage, I assume that command-P will print a given document. With Windows, control-P generally works. Have you tried them?

There's a link to bugzilla right above the "new reply" button in the forum.

[nrc]

Originally Posted by edwin.arneson

Oh, what fun. So I thought I'd try the newly GA Zimbra Desktop to see if it worked better then the Advanced client. It lasted about 5 minutes. I right-clicked on an e-mail message and selected "Show Original." Had I been using the Advanced client, I could have printed it. Using Zimbra Desktop I can't (of course copy/paste is a work-around).

I thought I'd put this in Bugzilla like everyone recommends, but after doing a couple of searches, Bugzilla seems to have gone away. So I'm typing here right now instead of Bugzilla.

Bugzilla has been working fine for me.

The "view original" works the same in both ZD and ZCS. If you run ZD in your browser instead of in prism you have the same print option.

"It lasted about five minutes?" Some clients don't even provide an option to view message source, never mind printing it.

[bdial]

i'm curious

Did you guys do an evaluation of zimbra before purchasing? It sounds like you've done some pretty comprehensive testing way more than most.

Were you part of the decision making process? If so or not, are you aware of why they decided to go ahead with zimbra implementation?

[edwin.arneson]

Originally Posted by bdial

i'm curious

Did you guys do an evaluation of zimbra before purchasing?

Yes, it was evaluated. It replaced both an in-house web mail system as well as Oracle Calendar.

Originally Posted by bdial

It sounds like you've done some pretty comprehensive testing way more than most.

As previously mentioned, I'm in IT here, but for the purposes of the e-mail system, I'm just a user. Hence, I didn't test Zimbra, I've just encountered lots of bug trying to use it.

Originally Posted by bdial

Were you part of the decision making process? If so or not, are you aware of why they decided to go ahead with zimbra implementation?

No, I was not part of the decision making processes. I don't have specific details as to their decision to go ahead (for instance, I don't know if they looked at anything else). One exigency was to get rid of the expense of Oracle Calendar and another requirement was to advance the functionality of the web mail system. I believe they are interested in the promise of the "collaboration suite" aspects of Zimbra and I'd suppose they didn't encounter any show-stopper bugs.

They do know there are bugs and issues (cf. SFU.ca » IT Services » Email at SFU » SFU Connect Calendar: Known Issues), but obviously the pros outweighed the cons.

I don't hate ZCS, and I even like some aspects a lot. The number of bugs seems mind-boggling, though, and suggested some sort of deficiency on Zimbra's side (the company) and hence the original question to see what opinions people had as to the reason.

Either testing or the specification of fixes/ehancements seems very deficient. For instance, take item (55) on my list:

Preferences/Shortcuts/Saved Search Shortcuts says
you can "Assign numeric shortcuts to Saved Searches."
In fact you can't. What you can do is assign numeric
shortcuts to saved Mail searches. Any other application's
saved searches don't appear in the "Choose Search" list
when you click on the "Browse..." button.

Someone wrote the code to enable saved searches. Someone wrote the code to enable saved search shortcuts. Someone presumably tested the features. Yet it doesn't work like you'd expect. Unlike some of the issues I noted, this isn't obscure; this isn't some hard to find feature. And combined with (54) why add this feature if it is going to be done so badly? Sure, part of it works, but why not do it correctly or don't do it at all? (Note that (55) is in Bugzilla as 12062 and tagged as an enhancement. If the preferences said "Assign numeric shortcuts to Saved Mail Searches in the default search folder" then 12062 would be an enhancement request. Since it says "Saved Searches" and doesn't work like it says, how can this not be a bug?)

[SPF]

IMO, they are trying to do too much.

I'm not sure the market was screaming for another bloatware fatclient. I think they should focus in on the Server and webclient, and then work on getting the existing little barely-working stuff up to professional levels. (hello J2ME client)

And I may be way off, but I get the feeling sometimes that they don't have nearly enough employees, especially local employees. But to be fair, I've mostly been satisfied with the support we've received. (network ed.)

[Perlpigeon]

Hi,

although initially I read some irritation between the lines in the previous posts, this thread seems to have turned into a positive one where there's constructive criticism, and with the help of mr. E. Arneson a list of to (quickly and thoroughly) resolve issues can be addressed. Great!

I just want to quickly let others - who are not so familiar with bug lists in a software company - know that a list of, well, say 200 or 1000 bugs for (in this case) both server and client side, multi-platform software that has not been developed and improved with the resources from a huge firm like Microsoft, is not really so uncommon or unexpected. Being in Content/Document Management business for 9 years now and having dealt back-end (technical) and front-end (end-user) with both Microsoft products and others, also Microsoft has had bug-lists these sizes, if not larger.

I have found that Zimbra is a great product, with all its little faults, as I find that Microsoft Exchange + Microsoft Outlook combined are great products with all their faults. My opinion is that Zimbra currently is setting a somewhat different footprint on managing communication and interactions which hopefully will result in both happy users and administrators.

Lastly my answer to the initial question from Mr. Arneson why zimbra is so buggy: because it is software that is being used.