On 08/02/14 09:49, Hasan Akgöz wrote:
> Zimba is prefect.

(I presume it was meant to say 'perfect' ;-))

I can agree with Zimbra being (quite) perfect.  I've been using Zimbra
at my primary job for some years and I've set up two Zimbra servers for
non-profit organisations.  And to get to know it better, I've even
installed it at my own server too.

To take the downside of Zimbra first ... It needs RAM and some CPU.  But
it can run fine virtualised.  And you need to dedicate at least one
server for Zimbra.  If you want to separate things more, spread the user
load and such, Zimbra does scale quite easily though.

On the pluss side is that the admin interface (both webUI and CLI) are
quite good.  I find myself doing most of the "quick jobs" via the webUI
and when there's typical mass-updates, I can script it using the CLI
tools.  It's fairly straight forward to get started, it installs and
configures itself fairly well using the install tools.  And it adds the
needed stuff to keep spamassassin and clamav updated.  And through the
admin CLI tool, you can tweak quite a lot more too.

It's even quite easy to set up a multiple-server setup, where you can
have 1 proxy front, and several mailbox servers (where the mails are
stored) ... and Zimbra routes everything to the right servers instantly.

Zimbra is in all aspects a Postfix SMTP server with SpamAssassin and
ClamAV integration using Amavis-new.  DKIM is also possible to enable.
A Zimbra install includes an OpenLDAP server, MySQL server, nginx for
proxy and apache for some other web-based utilities.  The IMAP/POP
server is part of the mailboxd process, which is a Java (jetty, iirc)
application.  And a bunch of perl stuff for monitoring and reports.
I've also written some external tools which queries the LDAP service
quite easily too.

Speaking of integration ... Zimbra can be integrated with an AD domain
too, so reusing the AD kerberos implementation and using the same
username/password as in Windows.  I've not tried this integration, but
if I did understand it correctly, Zimbra users can also be created
automatically on-the-fly when they log into the webmail the first time,
based on information from an AD/LDAP server.  Speaking of LDAP, you can
also authenticate against LDAP servers, and pull the global address book
from an external corporate LDAP server.

There are two versions of Zimbra, the OSE (Open Source Edition) which is
completely free. And there is the Network Edition (NE), which costs
money and you pay for a license based on how many users you have.  This
license fee also includes official support from Zimbra.

The main difference, software wise is that the NE ships with ActiveSync
for mobile (works very well with Andriod, iPhone and Jolla).  In
addition there's a more advanced message storage (you can archive old
mails on different harddrive volumes, which may be "cheaper" and slower
than the primary storage), an integrated and automated backup solution
(stores backups in a separate directory).  You can also delegate
different admin privileges to different users, even on just some mail
domains.  And there is an Outlook connector, which is a MAPI module for
Windows machines.  This integrates Zimbra almost like an Exchange
server, but running over http/https (if you have Zimbra proxy in front,
it can even use this one for this communication).

For the OSE edition, you have the ZExtras extension, which might be
cheaper.  That one also includes ActiveSync, Backup, storage management
and delegated admin - or you can buy just some of these extensions.
However, it will not give you official Zimbra support.  I've tried the
ZExtras Mobile extension on OSE, and it works fairly well too.

Zimbra is also officially supported running on RHEL6 and CentOS6.  I've
used SL6 for my servers, and that works very fine too, but you have to
"force" the install (--platform-override, iirc) to accept your SL
installation.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Zimbra.  As I said, it needs some HW
resources, but once that is done, it's working well.  My home server
(which only receives some hundred mails per day) runs virtualised on an
HP Microserver (with an AMD N36L, dual core 1.3GHz == not really
powerful).  The VM (using KVM/Qemu) is given both available CPU cores,
4GB of RAM and 50GB harddrive.  And it's running surprisingly well, even
the heavier admin webUI is running reasonably well.  Not fast, but not
that annoyingly slow.

On the other "proper production" servers, they're running on Intel
server CPUs (~2.5GHz and more), and the VMs there are having access to 4
CPU cores, 8GB of RAM and some 100GB of disk.  The biggest server serves
80 user accounts, with ~200 aliases and distribution lists.  And that's
running quite well.  These environments is using a multiple-server
setup.  One of the server groups is using OSE and the other NE.

What I do like about Zimbra is that it is really stable, and their
updates which comes fairly frequently is usually not too bad to install
either, even though, it's a manual upgrade process.  Documentation is
great, and the release notes is really comprehensive and helps you plan
upgrades quite well.

Zarafa which was mentioned, okay I'll admit I've not tried it, will
probably require some more work.  If I've understood Zarafa correctly,
it depends on having access to an existing SMTP and IMAP server setup.
In addition it requires Apache with PHP installed.  Zarafa adds the rest
(webmail, ActiveSync) on top of that base.  So it will require more work
to get ready ... But I might have misunderstood it.  With Zimbra, it's
just to install the OS, download and install the Zimbra tarball and run
the install script - and you're "done".  From now on you can then
configure the rest via the Zimbra admin webUI.

Okay, lets stop now ... As you've probably understood, I'm quite fond of
my Zimbra servers :)


--
kind regards,

David Sommerseth



> 2014-02-08 7:42 GMT+02:00 Bill Maidment <[log in to unmask]
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>>:
> 
>     Have you looked at zarafa?
>     Cheers
>     Bill
> 
> 
>     -----Original message-----
>     > From:Steven Haigh <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
>     > Sent: Saturday 8th February 2014 13:45
>     > To: [log in to unmask]
>     <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>     > Subject: Re: Exchange server alternative?
>     >
>     > On 08/02/14 13:08, ToddAndMargo wrote:
>     > > So I was wondering what you all thought would be a good
>     > > SL6.x substitute for Exchange server?
>     >
>     > I'd actually be interested in this too... I wrote a howto[1] on
>     getting
>     > virtual mail hosting using mysql + postfix + dovecot - however the big
>     > thing that is missing is contacts / calendar integration.
>     >
>     > Thunderbird can use caldav for calendar data, but the integration
>     > doesn't really seem to be there. As for contacts, this has the similar
>     > problem.
>     >
>     > I'd also be very interested in a method to sync calendar +
>     contacts that
>     > can be easily tied into Thunderbird / Android....
>     >
>     > --
>     > Steven Haigh
>     >
>     > Email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>     > Web: https://www.crc.id.au
>     > Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897
>     > Fax: (03) 8338 0299
>     >
>     > 1 - https://www.crc.id.au/virtual-mail-hosting-on-el6/
>     >
>     >
> 
>