Suggestion to the list maintainer

[Kuba Ober]

On Friday 18 January 2008, Tim Schmidt wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2008 1:06 PM, Tomas Kuliavas <tokul at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> > Zimbra is commercial groupware suite. SquirrelMail is free webmail
> > application. You are suggesting to replace whole user's email system with
> > some proprietary locked product.
>
> There's an (at least in name) FOSS version of Zimbra...  but eeew.  I
> am tasked with the unfortunate duty of admining a machine running
> Zimbra and I can say it's not worth the trouble.  Unless you like Java
> processes that gobble 2Gb of ram like cookies, that is.

On my server, the mysqld which runs the backend for Zimbra is taking up 0.4GB 
virtual, while Tomcat takes 1.1GB virtual. So don't bash Java just yet, as 
the "old school" DB server is taking up 1/4th of the system's virtual memory.

I don't really have much (or anything) in the way of problems with Zimbra. It 
uses the same ldap server for authentication as pam (ssh, etc) and samba, 
works pretty well with firefox, IE7 and IE6 with the service pack, and 
generally looks pleasant to the users.

There's no other equally functional solution out there that would be any 
better. I did my searching. Scalix took ages for me just to figure out how to 
set it up (they think that out-of-the-box functionality is an option, and 
that misleading or outright wrong documentation is OK), and besides those two 
there's really nothing else for a mostly OSS shop to deploy.

Having run squirrel for a 5+ years, and some of the most annoying bugs 
remaining unfixed (say support for national characters that actually works in 
real life), I just gave up.

Cheers, Kuba