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If you could collect your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and corporate messages into a single in-box, would you switch?

The convenience of a universal e-mail in-box is what gives Yahoo's offline, open-source, cross-platform Zimbra Desktop its appeal (Windows | Mac).

Then there are the other tools to tag and search messages that elevate the Web mail experience beyond what your POP and IMAP services may offer on their own. However, for many, Zimbra's ambitions, abilities, and the sticky tangle of its distribution will keep it an interesting experiment, but not yet a standalone replacement.

While Zimbra Desktop is available to anyone as a free download, the Zimbra team really had its existing users in mind as the chief beneficiaries of this release. The majority of Zimbra's 43 million paid customers come through businesses that are especially drawn to its collaboration tools (like sharing entire address books, documents, and in-boxes) and which typically use Zimbra's back-end server in place of the Microsoft Exchange Server.

Zimbra's online in-box, and now its offline desktop app, take on the role of the Outlook in-box. As with Outlook, the organization will assign the e-mail address. However, it also has an open-source following of people who run the server and desktop app to get these sharing capabilities for free.

Zimbra has some useful features even if you don't have a supported account.

(Credit: CNET)

The benefits of the Zimbra Desktop for these pre-existing users is significant. They can import third-party e-mail and supported third-party calendars in discrete in-boxes, and view expanded and contracted in-boxes in the familiar left-hand organization pane. For each account, including third-party Web mail, they can tag messages, search through e-mail, contacts, and calendar appointments, and view conversations that are organized together not so unlike Gmail's threading.

Zimbra account holders can additionally create wiki documents within Zimbra Desktop and share them with other Zimbra users. They can upload files into a local briefcase (this is separate from Yahoo's now-defunct Briefcase service,) and as mentioned above, can right-click e-mail in-boxes, contacts lists, and other content to export to another Zimbra user's Zimbra in-box within the organization.

These advanced sharing services are the e-mailing ideal, but not available to those of us who aren't on Zimbra's server (more on this below).

And if you don't have Zimbra-supported e-mail?
There's still some use in downloading Zimbra Desktop to help manage your third-party e-mail accounts, but complications and qualifications abound. You should be able to add any e-mail account that supports POP and IMAP standards, plus Yahoo e-mail, contacts, and calendar, and the same from Gmail. If your IT admins make your Outlook Exchange Server settings available to you, you'll be able to get your business e-mail as well.

Expandable subject groupings aren't exactly threaded like Gmail, but they similarly organize.

(Credit: CNET)

These third-party services are branded with a beta marker, a wise warning, since some work with a caveat. Hotmail, for example, will integrate with Zimbra Desktop, so long as you have a paid Hotmail Plus account, or have been grandfathered in from the Outlook Express days.

When you sign up in Zimbra, this is noted by the collapsed link "must allow client access." Likewise, the bumpy support for Gmail doesn't yet convert Gmail labels into Zimbra tags, and Zimbra Desktop 1.0 merges Gmail address book contacts in a way that only surfaces those contacts you've added by hand, not the contacts captured through day-to-day e-mailing. Zimbra says they're working on a fix, which should be released in a few weeks.

Once you've got your in-boxes migrated over, you'll be able to take advantage of searching through mail messages and adding tags, even if your third-party client doesn't support those features by default. Zimbra's ability to group conversations in any mail service is another benefit. Unlike Gmail's service, it won't thread conversations within a single in-box entry, but it will signify with an arrow tip in the margin when there's more than one message with the same subject line.

You'll still be able to create documents in Zimbra if you're using it to sort third-party accounts, but at this point they must route through the Zimbra server in order to share the link. In the future, these documents will send as external attachments, perhaps as soon as June.

Performance and accessibility
Since we didn't have access to a Zimbra-supported account, and therefore to its more advanced collaboration features, the program's overall performance is harder to gauge. Difficulties in setting up our unsupported Hotmail in-box and Zimbra's inability to import 90 percent of our Google contacts makes us hesitant to recommend it as anything more than a companion product for non-Zimbra users.

At more than 40MB for Windows and Mac editions, it was also slow to install and load. However, if you've got lots of space, the calendar importing, conversation view, and search fields are nice bonuses, as is the convenience of viewing multiple Web mail in-boxes in a single program interface.

While Zimbra's stated demographic with the Zimbra Desktop are its registered users, it doesn't help its cause that it takes effort to sign up for a Zimbra account. Most consumers find Zimbra through an organization that uses it; others may go through an Internet Service Provider or hosted partner that might sell subscriptions to Zimbra-powered features under the company's own name.

An open-source subset may run the open-source Zimbra Collaboration Suite on their networks, but for folks without a finger on the pulse of the open-source community, finding one of these to plug into could take more motivation than its worth.

Zimbra Desktop certainly has some budding in-box concepts we'd like to see ripen, but until Yahoo's Zimbra team can smooth out the grafting challenges with Gmail and other third-party services, those without Zimbra accounts who are feeling less experimental ought to stick to Thunderbird (Windows|Mac) as an Outlook alternative.

Updated April 29, 2009 at 8:45 am with more details about integrating third-party services.

We've been keeping our eye on Zimbra Desktop, the e-mail client that Yahoo acquired in 2007 and held onto for about a year before development work picked up again in earnest. Now, more than a year later, Zimbra Desktop 1.0 has shaken off its beta and is available as a free download for Windows and Mac.

Zimbra differentiates itself from Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client (Windows|Mac) and from Gmail in its amphibian nature as both an online and offline in-box. It also sees itself as a central in-box for all your e-mail, contacts, and calendar information. As such, you're able to access Yahoo and Gmail contacts, calendars, and messages in Zimbra, plus POP or IMAP e-mail from AOL, Hotmail, or your office. At least, that's in theory. According to Zimbra's Web site, syncing to some of the third-party e-mail and calendar services within Zimbra Desktop appear to remain beta features, like Hotmail, and Yahoo and Google calendars. While the support for these last two has been expanded in this release, a Zimbra representative told us, "officially those integrations are still considered 'beta' since they rely on APIs not maintained by the Zimbra team."

Unlimited storage and support for 20 languages rounds out the feature overview.

A slew of bug fixes and back-end tune-ups update the most recent beta version of Zimbra to its 1.0 release, a representative from Zimbra told CNET. Plus, there is now greater diversity in sharing Zimbra documents, and full support for Yahoo and Google contacts and calendars, in addition to Web mail.

While Zimbra Desktop 1.0 is free for personal use, Zimbra has been making Yahoo money through Zimbra Collaboration Suite, a hosted e-mail solution for schools and enterprise businesses like RedHat and 21st Century Realty Group.

Updated at bottom with some clarifications.

It's impressive to be able to give away 31.2 million free Gmail accounts, as Google has. It's even more impressive to get customers to pay for 40 million mailboxes, as Zimbra reported today, representing a sharp spike from the 20 million paid mailboxes reported in early 2009.

The secret to Zimbra's success? Innovation and integration, in part. While Google Maps has found its way into a range of different applications, Zimbra leads Gmail in mash-ups (called "Zimlets" in Zimbra parlance). My company is a Zimbra customer, and one of our sales engineers wrote a Zimlet to integrate Alfresco with Zimbra...in his spare time...over a weekend.

Yes, Zimbra is that easy to extend.

As for innovation, as just one example Zimbra beat Gmail to offline application access by two years. Not bad for a company with a fraction of Google's employees (or PhDs).

As VentureBeat points out, Zimbra is now ahead of Gmail in unique mailboxes and only slightly behind Microsoft's Hotmail service. That's pretty impressive: one little open-source company takes on the two titans of software and wins (against Gmail), or shortly could win (against Hotmail).

Yes, the jump from 20 million to 40 million is likely due to Comcast's decision to use Zimbra for its user e-mail accounts. But it's still impressive.

Frankly, it's a shame that Zimbra ended up with Yahoo, which has 92.5 million mailboxes. Though Zimbra is a standout in the industry, Yahoo's own strength in consumer e-mail likely keeps Zimbra in second place for resources internally, especially since Zimbra's enterprise-grade e-mail may not be a tight strategic fit. Zimbra would have been an exceptional match for Apple or Adobe with their design-savvy customer bases.

What's done is done, however, and Zimbra will just have to settle for getting 40 million paid mailboxes while others can hardly give that many away for free. It's a tough job, but someone has got to do it.

UPDATE: I should have pointed out that the Gmail numbers relate to U.S. totals. It wasn't my intent to mislead on that; I simply failed to call it out, and apologize. Also, as pointed out in the VentureBeat story, to which I linked, none of the numbers - Google's or Zimbra's - are absolutely to be relied upon, as ComScore numbers can be inaccurate and Zimbra's are self-reported. Even so, Zimbra's progress is impressive.

As for the source of the 20-million user jump for Zimbra, some of this comes from bring the Comcast users online with Zimbra. Zimbra announced the deal in 2007 but that there's a big time gap between closing a deal and deployment.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Zimbra co-founder Satish Dharmaraj will leave Yahoo in March, about a year and a half after the company acquired the open-source and online e-mail service provider.

Jim Morrisroe, a long-time Zimbra executive, will replace Satish as vice president of Zimbra, Yahoo said. He'll report to Scott Dietzen, Zimbra's former president who was promoted to senior vice president of communications products for Yahoo last year.

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital reported the departure earlier today, and now here's Yahoo's official statement:

"Satish Dharmaraj will be leaving Yahoo in March. Satish is a valued member of the Yahoo team and will serve in an advisory role to Zimbra. He leaves behind a dedicated team who will continue to deliver open source, collaborative messaging software, and expand into new markets. Satish's contributions to Zimbra and Yahoo have been invaluable and we look forward to his continued support of the Zimbra project."

Yahoo has been working to combine its Yahoo Mail team with Zimbra's programmers. Some Zimbra features inspired some of the changes in Yahoo Mail, such as Web-based applications, which are now just beginning to arrive with the Yahoo Open Strategy. The revamped Yahoo Calendar, still in beta testing, is based on Zimbra's calendar.

Yahoo acquired Zimbra for $350 million in September 2007. At least so far, though, the Zimbra technology hasn't grown into a full-fledged Google Apps competitor. The technology is available both as open-source software that can be downloaded and run on in-house servers or as an online service.

Yahoo said all of Zimbra's engineering team and the other members of its management team are still working at the company.

Yahoo on Tuesday released a hosted version of its Zimbra e-mail and calendar software for educational customers.

Zimbra is open-source software, which means anybody can install it for free, but Yahoo also offers Zimbra Hosted as a subscription for which customers pay. The education version has a "substantial discount" in pricing over the regular commercial version, Yahoo said.

Ordinary e-mail and calendar software such as Microsoft Outlook can be used to connect to Zimbra servers, but Yahoo also offers Web browser-based tools for using Zimbra.

One site using the hosted service is Kansas State University, with 30,000 students, faculty, staff, and alumni, said James Lyall, associate vice provost of IT at Kansas State University.

Zimbra competes not just with Microsoft's dominant Exchange server software, but also with the Google Apps service from Yahoo's top Internet rival.

Yahoo acquired Zimbra for $350 million in 2007. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is using Zimbra technology for a revamp of Yahoo Calendars and, later, Yahoo Mail. Last week, President Sue Decker gave Zimbra a mention as one of the acquisitions that helped increase the company's revenue.

Zimbra, the open-source e-mail software that Yahoo acquired for $350 million last year, is officially coming to Ubuntu Linux.

Coinciding with this week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Zimbra has announced a partnership with Ubuntu parent company Canonical.

Ubuntu users have been able to access Zimbra for the past year. But now, the e-mail software will be in the Ubuntu Partner Repository, providing easy access to both offline and online Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail, and any IMAP or POP e-mail accounts. Zimbra also offers document and spreadsheet functions, as well as mashup features with services like Flickr, Amazon.com, and Yahoo Maps.

Offline e-mail and documents are one area where Yahoo has beaten Google to the punch--but there have been strong hints that engineers at the latter may be rolling out something similar soon through Gears.

"Since we first announced general availability of Zimbra for Ubuntu last year, we have seen incredible adoption within the Ubuntu community," Andy Pflaum, senior director of business management for Yahoo's Zimbra division, said in a statement. "We are eager to offer our world-class collaboration experience, Yahoo Zimbra Desktop, to the vibrant community of Ubuntu users worldwide."

Update 11:03 a.m. PDT: I added more comment from Zimbra. Update 9:25 a.m. PDT: I added more background and details about my hands-on test.

Any of the 263 million Yahoo Mail users who were antsy for change now have something they can sink their teeth into.

The first real fruits of Yahoo's $350 million acquisition of Zimbra are becoming apparent with the release Thursday of the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. The e-mail software, available as a free download for Windows and Mac, works when the user is offline, and it offers options for basic online word processing and spreadsheets, task management, and file storage.

Zimbra Desktop's e-mail interface should be familiar to users of either Outlook or Yahoo Mail. (Click for larger version.)

(Credit: CNET News)

Zimbra Desktop means that Yahoo beat out Google in the race to provide e-mail that also works offline, but it took a different approach to get there. Google looks to be adding offline access through the open-source Gears project, a plug-in that augments a Web browser's abilities.

But Zimbra Desktop, while using browser interface technology called Ajax that can give Web browsers an elaborate interface, actually runs as a standalone application. It employs Java software to store data locally, and it's a hefty download--38MB for Windows, 34MB for Mac OS X, and 44MB for Linux.

Yahoo has formed a new group focusing on cloud computing, in which services available on the Internet substitute for local applications. But until the day when a reliable, fast Internet connection is available anywhere, offline access to applications is a significant feature.

Webmail is a compelling facet of cloud computing, letting people reach their e-mail from any number of computers or mobile devices. But from a user's point of view, Zimbra Desktop's approach--a downloadable application that doesn't run in a browser--is actually more like traditional e-mail client software such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.

Zimbra Desktop gives access to basic word-processing abilities, with documents stored online. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

"We've aimed to blur the line between an Ajax Web-client and a conventional desktop application, and this release is a leap towards reaching that goal," Zimbra's Mike Morse said in a blog posting Thursday.

Web e-mail comes full circle
Existing Zimbra customers can use the e-mail application through a regular browser, letting them access their e-mail from a machine that doesn't have Zimbra Desktop installed. But the Web client version doesn't offer offline access, said John Robb, Zimbra's vice president of product marketing.

So why use Zimbra Desktop when regular e-mail client software has provided offline access to e-mail for well over a decade?

"The exciting thing is you're getting the Zimbra features that haven't been available to people without the Zimbra server," Robb said, specifically mentioning conversations, tagging, small applications called Zimlets, and rich searching features such as the ability find all messages from a particular person and with a PDF attached.

Also, Yahoo Mail customers can't use the Zimbra browser-based interface yet, so they won't get access to Zimbra features when borrowing friends' computers or using airport kiosks.

Yahoo's Zimbra and Yahoo Mail programmers now are working more closely together, though, and the two projects will be converging somewhat.

"You should see a lot of synergy between the Yahoo Mail team and the Zimbra team. This is a first example," Robb said. "You'll see Zimbra technology appearing in many parts of the Yahoo Mail experience, and things from Yahoo Mail will come over to the Zimbra side."

After many months of quiet integration, Zimbra's ascent within Yahoo has been apparent. As part of a major reorganization in June, Zimbra leader Scott Dietzen was named to run all of Yahoo's messaging and communication work.

The software can be used to connect to Yahoo Mail and also to other accounts such as AOL or Gmail that support remote access via POP (Post Office Protocol) or the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).

Test-driving Zimbra Desktop
I had no trouble installing, configuring, and running Zimbra Desktop to send and receive e-mail. As with Yahoo's Webmail interface, it mirrors Microsoft Outlook's look and keyboard shortcuts.

However, it's not perfect. It didn't seem connected to my Yahoo address book for contacts or calendar for events.

Zimbra Desktop can handle multiple accounts; I had no trouble setting up access to my Gmail account.

Unless you instruct it otherwise, Zimbra Desktop will synchronize your in-box but not folders where you may have filed message. You can manually sync folders when you click on them, but the process worked erratically for me.

One feature I liked, similar to Gmail's conversation view, shows a small triangle next to e-mail messages that are part of a back-and-forth exchange. Clicking on the triangle expands the e-mail header list so you can see all the messages of the exchange.

Another feature I was glad to see is tags, which, similar to Gmail labels, let you describe e-mail messages in a more useful way than filing them into folders. Folders are better than nothing, but I hate having to decide which folder to use for a message that belongs to more than category--travel, photography, and family, to pick one example.

Zimbra's tags and Gmail's labels didn't synchronize, though. And tags are specific to an e-mail account, so clicking on a tag will show only a subset of messages within one

Zimbra Desktop's productivity suite elements are workable but nothing to write home about. Unlike Google Docs, Microsoft Office files can't be opened, and there's no presentation software. The spreadsheet is extremely spartan, and runs awkwardly inside the word-processing application.

Zimbra Desktop shows an icon in Windows' system tray, but not as an application in the Taskbar. I had one significant problem: When I was trying out a spreadsheet and minimized all my applications, not even the system tray icon was visible. Manually terminating the process didn't work either; an error message indicates Zimbra Desktop is still running somewhere on my system. Hello, reboot.

There's still work to be done getting Zimbra to run as a standalone application. This is the error message that I got after complications minimizing the application.

Robb confirmed that address book and calendar synchronization don't yet work. "We believe those are mandatory features to make it generally available," he said.

Other top priorities are making the documents better and endowing Zimbra Desktop with the instant-messaging feature available in the browser-based version, Robb said.

And right now Zimbra customers only can run the software by installing it on their own servers. Yahoo is working on a hosted version that Yahoo itself will run, he said, that will launch in coming quarters.

Zimbra Thursday released a version of its Web e-mail client that works on Java-enabled mobile phones and Apple's iPhone.

Zimbra e-mail client on BlackBerry, iPhone, and Nokia handset

(Credit: Zimbra)

With the release, the company, a division of Yahoo, released the source code for the product, called ZimbraME (Java Mobile Edition).

People can also use the software with a commercially-supported version of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0, which the company released earlier this year.

With Java-enabled phones, people can use the downloadable software to get e-mail or access Zimbra's calendar.

Last September, Yahoo acquired Zimbra, an enterprise Web email company. Zimbra is an impressive product. It does e-mail in a browser better than you've ever seen it. The company also makes a business-class e-mail server, and many of its services interconnect to Microsoft's e-mail products--the Exchange server and the Outlook client. Nonetheless, it is hard, at first glance, to see how Zimbra fits into Yahoo's business. Yahoo previously acquired OddPost, another dazzling e-mail technology company, and it was still in the process of rolling out OddPost-powered improvements to its millions of Yahoo Mail users when it acquired Zimbra.

But when I sat down with Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj to get a demo of the new offline e-mail client (very impressive), the importance of Zimbra to Yahoo became clear. Zimbra is not just an e-mail play. It's a nascent productivity suite. While aside from its well-developed e-mail offering it's still a very young product, it looks like it could eventually become a competitor to Google Docs and Google Apps (Google's consumer and business productivity suites, respectively) and potentially a competitor to Microsoft Office. On the other hand, if Microsoft acquires Zimbra, then this initiative will be in serious jeopardy, since it's doubtful Microsoft would scrap its own developing online suite products in favor of Zimbra's.

Is this the Web app or the desktop client? It's hard to tell the difference.

At any rate, here's what Zimbra has that makes it an emerging threat to other business productivity suites: first, it has a complete e-mail product set, including a mailbox service and a very strong client--online, offline, and mobile. The relatively new offline client is especially interesting: It uses the Firefox core (called Prism), but you'd never know you were in a browser-based app. Even links in e-mails to Web sites don't by default go to your Firefox browser; instead, they go the system default. If your PC is set to open up URLs with Internet Explorer, that's what the Zimbra client will do.

The Zimbra e-mail client is extensible through "Zimlets," which is Zimbra's word for code that tells the Zimbra app what to do with certain types of links. It's pre-coded to recognize URLs and pop up a preview when you hover over a link; and it offers intelligent options to pull up relevant data when it sees addresses, airline flight information, and stock market tickers. Zimbra administrators can add their own Zimlets as well, such as hooks to CRM apps like Salesforce.com, bug tracking (Bugzilla), a local wiki, and so on.

Zimbra's synchronization engine runs separately from the client and can be applied to more than e-mail. Part of Zimbra's emerging suite of business apps includes a budding document editor that lets you create "notebooks" that act as directories with different "pages" (documents) inside them. All the pages are word processing files now, although you can insert an extremely rudimentary spreadsheet into a page if you like. Zimbra has no current plans to build out its spreadsheet. No doubt the company waiting to see which way the Microsoft deal falls before trying to build an Excel competitor.

Zimbra now has a document editor and a repository for shared files, too.

Zimbra pages can be shared, wiki-like, but can't be edited in parallel as Google Docs can. That feature will be added in Q3, Dharmaraj told me.

Zimbra is currently pushing hard to win education (university) clients as well as ISPs; it has Comcast as customer, for example, although the suite hasn't yet been rolled out. The Yahoo subsidiary's focus on building out its e-mail app and winning big customers that account for thousands of users each is smart, but going on underneath that is a ramp-up of adding other productivity tools that's even more clever. The offline client is a key part of that strategy. With it, no matter what Zimbra builds, it can offer its users an experience that goes beyond just the Web.

For another look at a clever product that agnostic of the user's platform, see Evernote: "A tool for lazy slobs."