Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions
-
@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
Hi, My use is perhaps not the usual user so I do understand if perhaps you do not need any of the following.
I tend to work away from the office quite a lot and I work on desktops which aren't mine, but at the client site, therefore I cannot install anything on their PC.
Therefore I need a fully integrated solution which I can replicate in the same way at home as when I am (mostly the case) on site.
That includes:
a) email of course
b) activesync support for mobile devices (free with z-push). As I have all the mobile phones synced in native protocol. This way I have everything synced on the mobile phones, including tasks, notes, contacts, email etc. etc. Natively.
c) Outlook 2016 support with Exchange integration (not IMAP, but proper activesync) (comes again with z-push). When I go home I use Outlook 2016 and I tend to see that activesync and full integration is a lot better than IMAP.
d) very important for me. Cloud storage integrated with the main webapp application. I can create e-mails from attachments to and from the cloud and when I get back home, my main PC has the files on the cloud itself. It's all integrated in webapp. I have owncloud running and I can see my files everywhere I go, within the application. They are remotely synced on the main server and on the phone when I need.
e) chat (mostly) and videoconferencing which I do with the people who are at another site. Again it needs to be embedded in the same application, not requiring any plugins or software to be installed, but simply work out of the box within Chrome or Firefox (webmeetings).My understanding of Zimbra is rather limited and I am sure some of them may be available in one shape or other. However, I did stop looking and investigating when I looked at the following webpage:
https://www.zimbra.com/email-server-software/product-edition-comparison/
And realised that most of what I need is either only in the paid editions or even in the paid editions you still have to pay for it (e.g. zimbra talk).
My usage is too limited for me to justify buying a license.
In addition as you say the Kopano application looks a lot slicker at least from the demos and screenshots I have seen of Zimbra.
All the features I have listed above are downloadable for you at the Kopano community site.
Who knows, there may be some teething issues (that I do not have perhaps right now) but I get the entire software and it works for me. I get the entire packages and integration with cloud, web conferencing etc. etc.
I do understand if your needs are different and you are looking for something else.
That's why perhaps there is more than one product on the market to satisfy different needs.
As I said I did look at Zimbra but it is simply lacking the features (at least in the community edition) and I cannot use it. If it did, I'd be very happy to use it.
There may be public domains or whatever plugins to make Zimbra look or have those features, I am not sure, perhaps, but then, I am familiar with Kopano, I'll stick to it.
Is it perfect? no. Is it working? no. Is there a community edition which is the same as the official releases? no.
As I said I do get the mainline branch, test it, and when satisfied it works, I push it to my own production, I.e. I do my own release branches.
At the end, the world isn't perfect.
If you want basic functionalities and that's all you need, then pick Zimbra. The community edition is EXACTLY the same as the paid for one, it works, all great.
however
if you want more advanced featues and you can't live with Zimbra, then unless there are other solutions (and I am happy of course to listen to those) I have only Kopano I can chose from.
It has a LOT of features that I actually NEED on a daily basis.
Yes I have to watch out to use their mainline branch as opposed to official releases, but hey... that's life I suppose.
-
I'd be very very happy to look at alternatives that give me what Kopano does.
I did try a few times and I just came back to Kopano.
As I said my usercase is probably not the majority as the features I need are the most advanced.
Essentially I need to have my own office on the go at the client site with one browser (ONLY).
There is nothing else on the market that lets me do this in the community space.
At least not that I know of.
-
Our posts in the community have prompted a lot of changes. Their documentation for supported OSes is totally different today than it was yesterday.
-
They raced to add Ubuntu 16.04 this morning. Officially they only supported 14.04 yesterday, for example.
-
frankly I do agree with Patrick, your comments aren't very helpful. If it was me in the Kopano community I wouldn't reply.
If you want to help a community the best you can do is to HELP not to slag them off.
That's at least what I try to do.
Anyway I have work to do.
-
@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
frankly I do agree with Patrick, your comments aren't very helpful. If it was me in the Kopano community I wouldn't reply.
Patrick started as pushing for us to pay. I'm not helpful because the community was rude and intentionally not helpful. Read the posts in order. I asked totally reasonable questions, got absolutely unacceptable responses.
-
@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
If you want to help a community the best you can do is to HELP not to slag them off.
I don't want the community to help, I'm evaluating if they have a good community that can help. If you want them to look like a valid product, get them to be helpful and not rude. It's not my place to placate them, they never once tried to help from the beginning.
-
perhaps if you are not rude to people but you talk to them in a constructive way you will have more success.
A community is made of people trying to help. Otherwise there is no community.
That's at least what I do, with kopano or anything else.
-
@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
perhaps if you are not rude to people but you talk to them in a constructive way you will have more success.
But I had totally success, I think that that is what is missing here. I did not post rudely, if you feel that I did in my initial posts, please explain to me where that is, I because I believe that I posted very professionally and kindly without the slightest hint of rudeness.
Then I immediately got ridiculous, rude responses. How I responded after that is tough cheese, the community made their decision about how interactions there will happen. I already had what I needed to know - that it is not a community trying to help. Look at the first posts on each topic - or the CentOS one where there was no response at all until I pointed out that it was being avoided to make the rudeness in the others seem more viable.
-
In reality, the most important thing that we found is that they do a nightly release only model, there is never a freeze for testing in either the open or the commercial versions. That's very good info that we needed.
-
Check the official post by Kopano... saying that Patrick got his sense of needing to push me to pay for solutions because I bumped the CentOS thread so quickly. Except he ignored the fact that I Patrick did that an hour and a half before I bumped that thread and ignored the fact that the bump was to showcase exactly that.
Even the official people are looking for excuses and not being very careful in looking to see how they respond. Trying to make me sound urgent is just an excuse to cover up a rude community. Patrick made that up and the vendor is now trying to back it up.
-
Because people like to change things later, I want for the record what people are calling rude and pushing for urgency. Please see my initial post and the immediate mention of needing to pay for supported OSes.
Several people have called my post rude and needing urgency. How should I have approached this to keep the Kopano community from getting angry for having tested Ubuntu 16.10 when CentOS 7 didn't work?
-
There there was some back and forth with the vendor to help to explain to them how Ubuntu support works as they were not familiar with it. They kindly pointed out that Kopano doesn't support the same versions that Ubuntu does, so they have a "production mismatch" which we consider non-viable. So that's fine. It is what it is. Then Patrick picks up with this as his further response. Sure sounds like someone trying to get us to pay...
-
Patrick ( who I do not know what it is) simply pointed out that if you do want instant replies you need to have a subscription to have instant support.
Fair enough, that's same as RedHat vs Centos.
-
@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
Patrick ( who I do not know what it is) simply pointed out that if you do want instant replies you need to have a subscription to have instant support.
Fair enough, that's same as RedHat vs Centos.
Yes, pointed it out over and over when there was no reason to bring it up. It's like he's an advertising bot. What would prompt him to keep pushing when no one had any urgency except for him? That's the issue. Out of context, it's just pressuring us to pay money for responses - other than responses telling us to spend money.
-
I think it's perhaps people on the forums (like me) got fed up with your arrogance?
When I did go to Kopano / zarafa, or whichever software I use, I went kindly and trying to help for as much as I was helped, and this way I went far.
If you just go somewhere and tell them how arrogant you are, perhaps the response is: perhaps if you pay someone will reply to you?
I certainly wouldn't want to spend my time helping you even if, frankly, I could just do it as I do have Centos too.
-
@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
Fair enough, that's same as RedHat vs Centos.
I've never seen anyone in a Linux community ask a general question and get told to pay for support. Plus CentOS has access to all the RHEL code the same as RHEL. It's not a second class citizen that doesn't get the same freezes. It's very different than CentOS and RHEL. If they had something like CentOS and RHEL, we'd be thrilled. That's the exact production component that we were looking for here and don't have.
When you get CentOS for free, you have a working system. And a vendor that makes sure that it works. And communities that don't tell you to spend money to get responses (especially just for posting an issue.) Access to the full repos and so forth.
Zimbra is the same, full code the same as their commercial release. Yes, some pieces are left out, but what you get from Zimbra is the same tested, working, stood behind code that they use everywhere.
-
great, so get Zimbra and we will all be very happy
-
we will be all too happy if you choose something else
so please go and get Zimbra, install it, and please do not email me. -
@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
great, so get Zimbra and we will all be very happy
We did, last night. We already moved on. Was only doing this to provide Kopano with feedback above and beyond what we had planned to do. I didn't want to be pushing Zimbra on their site, and we are "glad" that their community solidified what was a questionable decision last night. But we talked about it and didn't feel that Kopano was production ready and seemed to lack an operational mindset for business use. But we were kind of on the fence, we had both working but decided that even with Kopano working, we couldn't trust them as a vendor. Today, though, we feel totally confident in that assessment and won't be evaluating it again, I imagine. Which is actually great, as we got to tear down the testing environment and focus on other things. Had we know what their community was like yesterday, we could have skipped the evaluation completely. But, importantly, we learned more about their commercial product this way and know that we could not work with that either. So that was useful. It was not a wasted exercise.
But all of that posting on their community was for their benefit, not ours.
