My experience with Zimbra and Yahoo! Mail

A few days ago I started using Zimbra Desktop for my primary email account, which happens to be Yahoo! Mail. Describing what Zimbra is isn't exactly easy because it's not exactly a local app yet not exactly a web app either. In fact it's both.

The closest equivalent to Z-Desktop is the Windows Live Mail client. For a Y! Mail account, it will sync everything like like WLM does, and a little bit more. Mail, calendar, contacts, etc. Although Z-Desktop works best with Y! Mail, it also does Gmail and Hotmail, and has the advantage of not being OS-specific as it runs on Windows, Mac or Linux.

I ran Z-Desktop through the ringer because my Y! Mail account has 15,000+ emails in it, and it took a long time for it to download it all. After that it took a while before it started syncing properly. Probably about a day. It seems to sync fine now - but the client still has some issues.

Advanced Search shows nothing before June 2009. Reindexing the mail didn't fix this.
Anything older than May 19, 2010 always shows as May 19, 2010. Reindexing the mail didn't fix this either.
Would be nice if there were a header-only option. The way Z-Desktop syncs is that it downloads a copy of everything. Windows Live Mail does this too, however you can configure that client to be header-only on a per-folder level. No such option exists in Z-Desktop. All you have per a folder is the Sync to be on or off. That's it. When on, it downloads a local copy of everything in that folder.

I'm guessing the reason Z-Desktop has a problem with some mails indexing right is because I've bounced around several mail clients over the years - all of which write email headers differently. But to have a problem displaying stuff properly before June 2009? Yeah, buggy client.

The saving grace of Z-Desktop is that you can pull down a full Y! Mail backup easily. That I like, and that's why I'm keeping it installed.

For regular mail use however, I'll still be using Y! Mail in the browser. That system indexes everything proper and shows proper dates for older mail - even for my ancient stuff.

Published 2010 Sep 1