Zimbra Desktop

» see zimbra.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Zimbra, Inc. was established on 26 July 2005 and spent two years building a mail and calendar suite good enough that Yahoo bought the company on 17 September 2007. The suite was a web application, and the obvious complaint about a web application in 2007 was that it needed the web. The answer was announced that March and shipped the following summer: Zimbra Desktop, a free client that pulled the whole mailbox onto your machine and gave you the same interface with the network unplugged. That was a real feature in 2008 and a maintenance burden by 2013.

It was built on Mozilla Prism, so what you installed was the Zimbra web client running inside a stripped-down Firefox with no address bar. Version 1.0 ran on Windows XP SP2 and up and on Linux. On the Mac it wanted Tiger or Leopard and an Intel processor, never a PowerPC. It would sync a Zimbra mailbox or any plain IMAP account, and it cost nothing, so it became the standard answer for anyone who wanted their work mail available on a train.

Offline mail was a stronger feature in Turkey than in California, and that gap is the whole of my memory of this product. A TTNet line in 2009 went away for reasons nobody explained, often in the evening, and an application that had already downloaded everything was the difference between an hour of work and an hour of reloading. The client was never interesting in itself. The thing it protected you from was the interesting part.

~ the chronicle ~

~ discontinued twice ~

Zimbra was sold to VMware on 12 January 2010, and VMware halted work on the desktop client in 2013. That same July the whole of Zimbra went to Telligent Systems, which renamed itself Zimbra, Inc. in September, and in February 2014 development on the client started up again. Synacor bought the company on 18 August 2015 and inherited a client that had already been canceled once.

The last release was 7.3.1, documented in an install guide dated August 2017. After that it sat there, downloadable and unmaintained, while the server product moved on to versions it had never been tested against. The Zimbra forums carry a thread from this period with the title "Zimbra Desktop Discontinued... Again?", which captures the mood of the user base better than any announcement did.

The official line, when it came, was two sentences in that thread from Zimbra's own side: the desktop was no longer supported, and it would reach the end of Technical Guidance on 1 October 2019. End of Technical Guidance is the last stage of Zimbra's published lifecycle, the point after which nobody at the vendor will discuss the software with you at all.

~ the bug that made it a liability ~

There was a technical reason the company stopped defending it. Against server versions 8 and above, Zimbra Desktop did not reuse its SOAP sessions, opening a new one for every request instead, and on a server with many mailboxes that behavior degraded performance for everybody. The forum thread where an ambassador explained that bug is the same thread that carries the discontinuation notice.

~ what it was actually for ~

Zimbra Desktop belongs to a short period when the serious question in email was where your mail lived. Webmail had won on convenience and lost on availability, so for about five years every suite shipped an offline mode or a desktop shell, and Zimbra's was the most complete of them because it was literally the same client. Then connections stopped dropping so often, and phones arrived with mail apps of their own.

The suite outlived the client by a wide margin and is still sold. What died on 1 October 2019 was the small free thing on the side, the one Yahoo had used to argue that a web mailbox could be yours in a way that mattered when the line went down.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »