Start-up Zimbra takes Web e-mail offline (ZDNet)

Posted Mar 27, 2007 12:12 UTC (Tue) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]

Zimbra has an "open source edition" as well as non-free "consumer edition", "business email edition", and two "network editions". It looks as if these other versions add the sort of stuff than an ISP would need, such as branding and advertising support, so open-source users still get most of the features that they want. There is a live demo, and it looks quite impressive compared to some other webmail applications. They must have a good graphics / CSS person!

Anyway, if this sort of thing interests you, do please have a look at my own attempt, Decimail Webmail (http://decimail.org/webmail) (GPL). The approach that I have taken is to write an IMAP email client in Javascript, and to wrap the IMAP commands and responses in a simple HTTP wrapper. On the server you just need a regular IMAP server, plus a small proxy that handles the HTTP wrapping and unwrapping. As the author, the benefit of this approach is that the code is all in one place (and all in one language), rather than split down the middle as a conventional web-based application would be. Users get an email application that is nearly as responsive and feature-full as a conventional IMAP client.

Currently Decimail Webmail is still 'alpha', mainly because it doesn't work at all with Internet Explorer, it has some serious issues with character sets, and it doesn't recover gracefully when something goes wrong. There is an online demo but it runs on a massively overloaded virtual machine and the demo account is full of spam, so don't expect it to work properly. Feedback and contributions would be very much welcome. How about some CSS and graphics to make it look as smart as Zimbra?