Newbie: How handles Zimbra time accuracy?

[AnaG]

Hi there!
I´m going to start using Zimbra in one of the webhosts listed in this page.
We´ve always used Outlook Express, and wanted to be able to do the work via browser.

But I´ve a question (maybe a bit stupid )

How does Zimbra handles when two people enters the same account, and try to answer the same email?

Thanks in advance guys! And sorry about my innaccurate english


Anita

[phoenix]

Well, my question would be - why do you have two people with access to the same email account? That's a security breach as far as I'm concerned.

[andreychek]

Originally Posted by AnaG

How does Zimbra handles when two people enters the same account, and try to answer the same email?

Howdy,

Yeah, I can see a number of reasons when this would be desirable (for example, multiple people might be handling emails sent to info@somedomain.com).

That said, I can't help but think that you'll be dealing with constant "race" conditions... multiple people might end up responding to the same message and such. So that might not work well, to have them all accessing the same mailbox.

The best way I can think of to handle this is first, to use seperate email accounts for each person.

Then, have fetchmail run from cron. It could pull email from this main account, and alternate which mailbox it delivers the mail to.

So, maybe have fetchmail run every 10 minutes... the first time, it'd deliver the mail to user FOO, the second time, deliver to user BAR, etc.

Hope that helps,
-Eric

[pshah]

There is some level of syncing that happens on the web client via notifications from the server (more details below) but we dont necessarily go out of our way to test this in the case where you have two simultaneous sessions running for a single account.

For example, notifications are sent to the web client anytime the client makes a request to the server. They contain any changes the client does not know about since the last time a request was made. If the client is not making requests (via a response to user input), there is a timeout value of inactivity the client will poll the server with (just so it can get these notifications and stay in sync).

So if you have two sessions open, notifications will help in keeping the two sessions in sync, but as andreychek said, you will still run into race conditions which can lead to some undesirable/unexpected behaviour.

Hope this made sense

[Dirk]

Making three tags, Unseen, PersonA and PersonB. Then set a filter to tag every message with Unseen. Then you have two people reading the same account, they remove the Unseen tag and apply their own tag before working on a message, once you get into the habbit of refreshing the view before tagging anything, this should avoid both people doing the same work.

I can see cases where multiple people having access to the same account can be useful, but it's never going to work out 100% smoothly.