I’ve been a happy Evolution user for some time. Then I moved my mails to Thunderbird when I needed something lighter. It’s only recently that I thought of testing Zimbra. I heard about it been a while but never cared to give a try.

Well … I did that today. I’m impressed! I didn’t actually expect to find so much features bundled inside such a “light” appliance. The whole client software actually comes in a VMware desktop appliance. Initially I thought it would eat up a lot of system resources but to my surprise it didn’t. It’s fast & responsive although being inside a VM.

Installation was pretty straightforward. The Linux package comes as a TGZ file. Upon uncompressed you will find an installation script in python. All you need to do is execute & answer a couple of questions. That being done you should find a brilliant Zimbra icon on your desktop.

tar -zxvf zdesktop_7_2_2_ga_b11951_20130318070459_linux_i686.tgz

cd zdesktop_7_2_2_ga_b11951_linux_i686
./install.py

I tested mail accounts provided by Google Apps mail and Gmail. They work flawlessly with Zimbra. Gmail has pre-set values, you only need to provide your login id and password. Other mails supporting POP and IMAP can be set up easily.