I have been using Yahoo’s Zimbra Desktop as my primary collaboration client for nearly four weeks now. During that period, I reported a number of bugs and voted for many other bugs and feature requests. Unfortunately, Zimbra Desktop is as yet unsuitable for productive use.
Zimbra Desktop itself is actually the Zimbra Web client, but running locally inside Prism, a Mozilla XULRunner application. Zimbra is leveraging their existing client, with a few changes, and running it locally. The background daemon handles actually syncing mail with Zimbra proper. It also speaks IMAP and POP3 and interfaces with a number of APIs for Web based services, like gmail.
Sadly, the desktop client facade implies native responsiveness and functionality where none exists. All limitations of a Web client still exist.
Column sorting is limited. Pagination renders column sorting generally useless. Want to sort on a particular sender, select those emails, and delete them from your inbox? Not so fast with Zimbra Desktop. You can try to use the search interface instead, but it frequently behaves in unexpected ways and the search interface itself is confusing.
For example, an advanced search by sender for an email with spam in it doesn’t work, but spamcop did. Why? Who knows.
If you’re into having messages sorted in ascending order by received date, you’re out of gas with Zimbra Desktop. The pagination puts those messages on the last page, but results always start on page one.
The paging itself is unclear. The icons are up and down, not left or right as one would expect.
Paging, in fact, is a significant misfeature stemming directly from the unique way in which Zimbra Desktop recycles the server based Web client into a native experience with Mozilla Prism.
Other issues include lack of persistence in visible colums, expanded mail folders, and the poor handling of multiple uploads.
Moreover, there is no way to specify a draft or trash folder on an IMAP server, so interoperability between ZD and other IMAP clients is notably poor. Sent email and deleted mails should be immediately available across all IMAP clients, not saved on the local system. Using two installs of Zimbra Desktop, both connecting to the same IMAP server from different systems, I found the movement of mail between folders rarely unnoticed on the other. (I have seen this behavior a few times with KMail, too.)
One of the big wins, if you’re using a Zimbra account, is server side filtering. All filters will persist between clients. Additionally, Zimbra allows you to tag any resource, including from within a filter. Strangely, a bug in Zimbra seems to limit you to a maximium of 63 tags defined. Odd.
The calender is one of the bright spots of Zimbra Desktop. The limitations of the Web based UI don’t hamper effective usage of the calendar.
The tasks, unfortunately, are as abandoned in ZD as in Mozilla’s Sunbird. You can’t see the task description, which includes support for rich HTML text, without editing the task you want to see. That’s entirely nonsensical. The “Click here to add new task” seemingly creates phantom tasks. You can’t sort on nearly any useful field.
While ZD’s documents feature, seemingly an inline wiki, initially piqued my curiousity, I found it wasn’t possible to save documents into an existing Zimbra server install. The documents never appeared to save. Unfortunate.
As ZD runs an entire Web stack on the local system, the memory requirements are quite high. It also saves a copy of each message uncompressed on the local system, so disk utilization is much higher than it would otherwise be if you’re using it as an IMAP client. (I’m at a few hundred MBs for only about 5k messages on IMAP.)
While Zimbra Desktop held much initial promise — a desktop client that supports no only email, but calendaring, tasks, file uploads, and a shared wiki like thing — in practice it’s unwieldly. Death by a thousand cuts. ZD gets some key things correct, but misses too many smaller items to prove sustainable over the long term. I’m hopeful version 2 will be a natively client, perhaps based on XULRunner directly or via the QT library.
A collaboration client that is advertised as a native client ought to be behave as a native client. Except for the multiple account and IMAP support, there’s no reason to use ZD if you’re already using Zimbra Web client. For vanilla IMAP users, there are other clients to choose from, although sadly few good ones.