How Zimbra tops Google's Gmail
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.
A commentator below rightly points out the difference between active users of a service and the raw number of mailboxes sold (in Zimbra's case). This is a useful, but not dispositive, point. If anything, it probably affects Gmail's reported numbers more negatively than Zimbra's.
At any rate, which problem would you rather have: paid but inactive users or freebie inactive users? I'm guessing that Zimbra will happily take the former, and work to innovate more to turn passive accounts into active users; otherwise, Comcast and other customers simply won't renew their subscriptions.
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.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The last time i pay for a email service was ... never!. University email, then hotmail, then softhome, then yahoo and finally gmail
..... now i get it :Zimbra is not a gmail, Zimbra is a company that sell a *email webserver* with some fancy email client interface and such.
Also, since it doesn't look like Zimbra actually hosts email for people (or if they do, it's just for .EDU sites?), this really isn't a comparison.
It would be like comparing the number of AT&T subscribers to the number of people using Uniden cordless phones. You're comparing apples to orange hammers.
Nice try, Zimbra. Pat yourself on the back and move on.
I think it's a clever disguise. Zimbra powers a lot of paid email accounts, of which there are millions. A lot of people bundle it with other services, but those count as well. Comcast customers all get emails with their internet accounts and those aren't people "signing up" for Zimbra.
I honestly don't see what's so great about Zimbra. I downloaded the program for my desktop several months ago when I first heard about Zimbra. And it's very buggy. Half the time it gives me errors messages when checking my Yahoo email. *Shrugs* There's no accounting for what people like.
My Outlook Express/Thunderbird checks all my email boxes, except Yahoo. So I don't use free Yahoo email for anything much except throwaway addresses.
And Hotmail hurt themselves when they discontinued POP access to their free email addresses. Then there's the fact that their addresses get spammed so much, and are insecure. I did an experiment with Hotmail this past year. I made a brand new Hotmail account and didn't use it for anything, and within a week I had spam rolling in.
Gmail is easy to use, I can check my mail with multiple email clients of my choice. The amount of storage is right, and Gmail doesn't shut down an account if you don't check your mail for however many days. It's easily customizable, and simple to use. it doesn't force you to use an interface you don't care for. Gmail is win win for me.
Yahoo is annoying with its reader pane, and the way they have their options set up. And it's just plain ugly. They also have a very limited number of choices for colors and themes.
I have limited vision so I need a dark background with colored letters to read my email. I also need adjustable font sizes. Yahoo fails big time there, as well as Hotmail. Yahoo also has a big problem getting mail delivered in good time. I've had emails delivered as long as a day after the time they were sent. That is not good for time sensitive emails.
I'll stick with Gmail. I was extremely glad when Gmail debuted, and within a week of Gmail sending me an account invitation, I had all my email addresses switched over to Gmail.
What annoys the daylights out of me, is that my ISP, AT&T, recently switched to Yahoo for their home page and email. Therefor forcing me to use yahoo whether I like it or not. So the numbers reported by Yahoo are suspect as well. Because I alone have access to 10 email boxes. If I didn't have Outlook Express/Thunderbird for my email, I'd switch to a different ISP just because they use Yahoo for their home page and email and I don't like either one. I have 20 active email addresses and I use every one of them. I also have 4 email addresses for family use only. I get thousands of emails per week from active groups I belong to, replies from my blogs, and different newsletters. That doesn't include the number of spam emails I trash every day. If I let my email slide for a few days, it would strain even the limits of my gmail boxes.
So it's not like I'm an occasional email user. Out of all the email providers I've tried and discarded, Gmail is the easiest to use and customize, and has more features that are useful to me than any other email provider.
The last part of the article got me thinking, too. With Apple sitting on $26 billion and Yahoo fighting for survival...
We've been evaluating it for our corporate usage, Google Premier is just not ready for prime time in my humble opinion after some initial poor experiences described here: http://freeversing.com/?p=47
I wouldn't call Zimbra a gorgeous stack, but it certainly gets the job done and unlike Google, has a community edition that you can host yourself, free of charge.
Matt is saying Zimbra jumped from 20 million to 40 million paid accounts in 1 quarter because of Comcast. I don't buy it, the math just doesn't add up.
1. The Comcast deal happened in 2007. Why the sudden spike in 2009?
2. As of Dec 2008, Comcast "only" had a total of 15 million Internet customers. In 2007 (prior to the Comcast deal) Zimbra claimed to having 6 million customers. Even assuming all Comcast Internet customers have Zimbra accounts, that only totals 21 million. So where did Zimbra get the other 19 million paid accounts from in the last quarter?
3. How many of those Comcast "paid for" accounts are actually in use? *Everyone* I know on Comcast use GMail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail for email (granted my sample of friends isn't statistically significant.)
4. I'm wary of some serious "numbers inflation" game happening here. E.g., Zimbra gets paid some low-ball number to serve company X who has N customers. Company X offers "5 free email accounts" to their customers and suddenly Zimbra claims to have (5 * N) "paid" accounts.
5. I'd bet Google makes overwhelmingly much, much more money "giving away" free Gmail accounts as compared to what Yahoo/Zimbra pulls in from all these supposedly "paid" accounts.
Quit being a hater. For such a relatively unknown upstart, even 20 million paid mailboxes is quite a feat.
MS has already "fooled me twice" (killed two programs we depended on). Sorry Zimbra, I can't risk a third.
CNET, do your research add some value here instead of recycling what Zimbra's marketing team feeds you!
The VentureBeat article you cite is referring to unique monthly visitors in the U.S., not mailboxes, and not worldwide. I'd be willing to be that Google's number of mailboxes worldwide is far higher than its number of monthly visitors in the U.S. Same with Hotmail (MS claims something like 130m mailboxes) and Yahoo. Sure, some of those are duplicate accounts, but you ought to get your facts right.
That said, yeah, getting even a few million people to pay for Web-based e-mail is pretty remarkable.
Hotmal mostly had dormant accounts. A substantial base of Hotmail users have started using Gmail though they
have a mailbox still on HOTmail and are counted as Hotmail user.
Being an IT guy, I am familiar with Zimbra and even tried it early on, and if I needed an in-house solution I would definitely consider that (right now we use Google apps, since I don't have time to manage a server!). However, comparing Email server software and an email service are completely different! I see no relevance in the comparison. If you are talking about the server software behind Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo to Zimbra, then it might have some relevance. Can you explain why you are comparing the two? Why not compare Zimbra to Exchange or to postfix or some other server software?
As BIGELLOW said above, "You're comparing apples to orange hammers."
It was slow to download. Took a long time to install; LONG time to load. Once loaded, it was slow and unresponsive. Plain looking; not terribly attractive. Doesn't do anything I can't do with Outlook, which is faster as well as better-looking.
HORRIBLY slow to uninstall. After, my system was noticeably slower. It seems to have recovered after reboot, but I'm not entirely certain.
Bottom line: Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
I 'maintain' a zimbra server with about 200 mailboxes. Migrated to it from Exchange last year and haven't looked back once. I've had to reboot it once in the last 11 months.
Oh yeah, the RHEL 5 and Zimbra Server software portion of the project cost about a fifth of what just the Exchange software would've cost upfront, not to mention server OS licensing.
I use the Zimbra Desktop client also, just updated to the latest version earlier today (zdesktop_1_0_build_1513_win32.exe. )
It's fast, it's full featured and oh yeah, it's FREE!
I have about 10 users who use Outlook'07 with Zimbra (requires the 'Outlook' connector for Zimbra server), about 20 users who use the Zimbra Client and the rest use the web version. They all work just fine.
Over the air syncing with windows mobile devices was so easy I delegated it to my most junior dept member after the first try.
Zimbra server also lets you create your own AJAX based 'zimlets' so you can add your own widgets to the server and access through the clients.
I think Zimbra, both server and client, are awesome.
- by bjbrock March 12, 2009 2:48 PM PDT
- If you consider all of the users of Zimbra's FOSS offering you would probably blow the lid off Google and Hotmail.
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