Once upon a time, Yahoo dominated the Internet. In a time when portals were all that mattered, Yahoo was one of the biggest. Then, all of that changed, and search became the name of the game. In reality, Yahoo’s number two position is still enviable (Microsoft even tried to buy the number two spot by buying Yahoo). Yahoo needs something more. It hopes its new email client might be part of that.
Zimbra Desktop
Yahoo purchased Zimbra in September of 2007. Since then, the email products offered by the company have remained an interesting, if not wide-spread offering. Recently, however, Yahoo decided to unleash the mass users of its Yahoo Mail service by offering a free version of Zimbra which allows for full access and synchronization of Yahoo email accounts (even of free accounts) from a desktop based client. Zimbra even allows for offline access of that same email.
Zimbra is not limited to working with Yahoo accounts. In fact, Zimbra works with any email server supporting the near universal POP or IMAP standards which includes another Internet titan, Google’s Gmail. Setup is remarkably easy with, of course, Yahoo Mail being the easiest to setup. Simply entering a username and password gets you on your way with your Yahoo account. Other email accounts setup almost as simply by entering in the addresses of the appropriate mail server and the ports they use.
Zimbra supports SSL for secure email connections, which is a nice plus.
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Zimbra is coded in Java which is a double-edged sword. On one hand, users of multiple operating systems can use Zimbra on all of their machines. On the other hand, Zimbra hogs system resources like the biggest selfish kid at a cupcake table. Process Explorer shows Zimbra running a zdesktop.exe process with over 125MB of private memory, plus the prism.exe service which uses another 33MB. All in, that’s 158MB of RAM for an email client - a bit on the heavy side (also like the selfish kid at the cupcake table).
