Zimbra Collaboration, formerly known as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) before 2019, is a

collaborative software Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them". As re ...

suite that includes an

email server Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host ...

and a web client. Zimbra was initially developed by LiquidSys, which changed their name to Zimbra, Inc. on 26 July 2005. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite was first released in 2005. The company was subsequently purchased by

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

on September 17, 2007, and later sold to

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

on January 12, 2010. In July 2013, it was sold by VMware to

Telligent Systems Telligent, A Verint Company is an enterprise collaboration and community software business founded in 2004 by Rob Howard. The company changed its name to Zimbra, Inc in September 2013 after acquiring Zimbra from VMWare. In August 2015, Verint Sys ...

which changed its name to Zimbra, Inc. in September 2013. It was then acquired by

Synacor 'Synacor Inc.'' is a technology and services company headquartered in Buffalo, New York. It provides email and collaboration tools througZimbra and TV Everywhere authentication and identity management services througCloud ID In addition to Buff ...

on 18 August 2015. According to former Zimbra President and CTO Scott Dietzen, the name for Zimbra is derived from the song "

I Zimbra "I Zimbra" is a song by American new wave band Talking Heads, released as the second single from their 1979 album '' Fear of Music''. According to Sytze Steenstra in ''Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from Talking Heads to the Pres ...

" by

Talking Heads Talking Heads were an American rock band formed in 1975 in New York City and active until 1991.Talkin ...

Edition

The software consists of both

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...

and

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

components, and at one time also offered a desktop email client, called Zimbra Desktop. Two versions of Zimbra are available: an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

version, and a commercially supported version ("Network Edition") with

closed-source Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and inte ...

components such as a proprietary

Messaging Application Programming Interface Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is an API for Microsoft Windows which allows programs to become email-aware. While MAPI is designed to be independent of the protocol, it is usually used to communicate with Microsoft Exchange Se ...

connector to Outlook for calendar and contact synchronisation. The now discontinued Zimbra Desktop was a full-featured free desktop

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

. Development was discontinued under VMware's stewardship in 2013 but was restarted in February 2014, but was ended again by 2019. The web client featured an HTML5 offline mode starting with version 8.5. The Zimbra Web Client is a full-featured collaboration suite that supports email and group calendars. At one time it featured document-sharing using an

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...

web interface that enabled tool tips, drag-and-drop items, and right-click menus in the UI. Today it has document sharing, chat, and videoconferencing. Also included are advanced searching capabilities and date relations, online document authoring, "Zimlet" mashups, and a full administration UI. It is written using the ''Zimbra Ajax Toolkit.'' The Zimbra Server uses several open source projects (see the section, '' Included open source projects''). It exposes a

SOAP Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are use ...

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...

to all its functionality and is also an

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

and

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common p ...

server. The server runs on many

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s. On other, non-Linux operating systems it can be run using a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

and using container technology. It supports CalDAV, CardDAV and SMTP for messaging, LDAP for directory services, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD). Zimbra uses Postfix for its MTA functionality. It includes technology from ClamAV, SpamAssassin and DSPAM for anti-malware features and S/MIME for email signing and encryption. OS X Server support was dropped with version ZCS 7.0. Zimbra can synchronize mail, contacts, and calendar items with open-source mail clients such as

Mozilla Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source cross-platform email client, personal information manager, news client, RSS and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation and operated by subsidiary MZLA Technologies Corporation. The project s ...

and

Evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

and also with proprietary clients such as

Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 software suites. Though primarily an email client, Outlook also includes such functions as Calen ...

and

Apple Mail Apple Mail (officially known as Mail) is an email client included by Apple Inc. with its operating systems macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. Apple Mail grew out of NeXTMail, which was originally developed by NeXT as part of its NeXTSTEP operating ...

, either through proprietary connectors or using the

ActiveSync ActiveSync is a mobile data synchronization app developed by Microsoft, originally released in 1996. It synchronizes data with handheld devices and desktop computers. In the Windows Task Manager, the associated process is called wcescomm.exe. O ...

protocol, both available exclusively in the commercially supported version. Zimbra also provides native two-way sync to many mobile devices.

Software license

The closed source variant Network edition is distributed under the Zimbra Network Edition EULA. Starting with version 8.5 the Zimbra source code is available under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

version 2 (backend) and the

Common Public Attribution License The Common Public Attribution License ("CPAL") is a free software license approved by the Open Source Initiative in 2007. Its purpose is to be a general license for software distributed over a network. It is based on the Mozilla Public License, b ...

version 1 (frontend). Previous versions were released under the Zimbra Public License (ZPL). The

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

accepts the license as being a

free software license A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) ...

and refers to it as being identical to the Yahoo! Public License with the exception that Zimbra, Inc. provides the license, rather than Yahoo!.

Included open source projects

The Zimbra Server uses open source projects such as: * Postfix *

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

(since version 8.5) * OpenDKIM (since version 8.0) *

OpenLDAP OpenLDAP is a free, open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) developed by the OpenLDAP Project. It is released under its own BSD-style license called the OpenLDAP Public License. LDAP is a platform-independe ...

Jetty A jetty is a structure that projects from land out into water. A jetty may serve as a breakwater, as a walkway, or both; or, in pairs, as a means of constricting a channel. The term derives from the French word ', "thrown", signifying somet ...

(since version 5) *

Lucene Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a ...

ClamAV Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) is a free software, cross-platform antimalware toolkit able to detect many types of malware, including viruses. It was developed for Unix and has third party versions available for AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Linux, macOS, OpenVMS, ...

SpamAssassin Apache SpamAssassin is a computer program used for anti-spam techniques, e-mail spam filtering. It uses a variety of spam-detection techniques, including Domain Name System, DNS and fuzzy checksum techniques, Bayesian spam filtering, Bayesian filt ...

Amavis Amavis is an open-source content filter for electronic mail, implementing mail message transfer, decoding, some processing and checking, and interfacing with external content filters to provide protection against spam and viruses and other ma ...

(amavisd-new) * DSPAM
deprecated
starting 8.7) *

Aspell GNU Aspell, usually called just Aspell, is a free software spell checker designed to replace Ispell. It is the standard spell checker for the GNU operating system. It also compiles for other Unix-like operating systems and Windows. The main pro ...

nginx Nginx (pronounced "engine x" ) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 2004. Nginx is free and open-source software ...

(since 5.0) *

ØMQ ZeroMQ (also spelled ØMQ, 0MQ or ZMQ) is an asynchronous message passing, messaging library, aimed at use in distributed application, distributed or concurrent applications. It provides a message queue, but unlike message-oriented middleware, a ...

(since 8.0) It previously used: *

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

(last used in version 8.0) *

Apache Tomcat Apache Tomcat (called "Tomcat" for short) is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. It provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can also ...

(last used in version 4.5) *Perdition mail retrieval proxy (until 4.5)

References

External links

* {{Aggregators Free email software Webmail Instant messaging Free groupware Collaborative software Web-based email clients for Linux Email client software for Linux

Edition

Software license

Included open source projects

See also

References

External links