Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions
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Notice, the one thread where we did it first, where we followed the docs to the T, used the recommended OS... not one comment, not even a "I'll look into this." But the other threads where we looked for other options when CentOS didn't work were pretty quick to point out that we should be using CentOS and ignoring the fact that we were only looking at the others because it didn't work.
https://forum.kopano.io/topic/47/kopano-core-install-fails-on-centos-7-due-to-missing-package
It's nice that people are responding. But one guy made it clear that if we weren't paying we weren't welcome in the community. Another just gave us an obvious run around to try to make it look like it was our fault. And another wanted to know what cloud hosting was and why we'd want enterprise OSes. Other than the manual getting updated (we found several manual mistakes as newbies) the community has been way less than helpful.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
The community and the product work great for me. I have no idea who Patrick is perhaps a paying user.
I am not a paying user and it works for me
I doubt he's a paying user. My guess is an employee who takes offense to anyone questioning the product. He was extremely emotional as a first response. Very angry that we'd want the product to work without having paid for it.
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@mcostan I really do appreciate all of the insight and feedback and pointing us to the community. The community has been very helpful in the process already. I'm glad that the product is working for you and if you want to demo it sometime I'd be happy to watch. Remote session isn't possible given my crappy connection, but a screencap would be awesome. A thread on it would be even better. Show it off, talk about why you like it!
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Funny bits... our thread on Ubuntu 16.10 support is already the number one thread, of all time, for Kopano's forums. And I'm the number two all time community member.
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Hi, My use is perhaps not the usual user so I do understand if perhaps you do not need any of the following.
I tend to work away from the office quite a lot and I work on desktops which aren't mine, but at the client site, therefore I cannot install anything on their PC.
Therefore I need a fully integrated solution which I can replicate in the same way at home as when I am (mostly the case) on site.
That includes:
a) email of course
b) activesync support for mobile devices (free with z-push). As I have all the mobile phones synced in native protocol. This way I have everything synced on the mobile phones, including tasks, notes, contacts, email etc. etc. Natively.
c) Outlook 2016 support with Exchange integration (not IMAP, but proper activesync) (comes again with z-push). When I go home I use Outlook 2016 and I tend to see that activesync and full integration is a lot better than IMAP.
d) very important for me. Cloud storage integrated with the main webapp application. I can create e-mails from attachments to and from the cloud and when I get back home, my main PC has the files on the cloud itself. It's all integrated in webapp. I have owncloud running and I can see my files everywhere I go, within the application. They are remotely synced on the main server and on the phone when I need.
e) chat (mostly) and videoconferencing which I do with the people who are at another site. Again it needs to be embedded in the same application, not requiring any plugins or software to be installed, but simply work out of the box within Chrome or Firefox (webmeetings).My understanding of Zimbra is rather limited and I am sure some of them may be available in one shape or other. However, I did stop looking and investigating when I looked at the following webpage:
https://www.zimbra.com/email-server-software/product-edition-comparison/
And realised that most of what I need is either only in the paid editions or even in the paid editions you still have to pay for it (e.g. zimbra talk).
My usage is too limited for me to justify buying a license.
In addition as you say the Kopano application looks a lot slicker at least from the demos and screenshots I have seen of Zimbra.
All the features I have listed above are downloadable for you at the Kopano community site.
Who knows, there may be some teething issues (that I do not have perhaps right now) but I get the entire software and it works for me. I get the entire packages and integration with cloud, web conferencing etc. etc.
I do understand if your needs are different and you are looking for something else.
That's why perhaps there is more than one product on the market to satisfy different needs.
As I said I did look at Zimbra but it is simply lacking the features (at least in the community edition) and I cannot use it. If it did, I'd be very happy to use it.
There may be public domains or whatever plugins to make Zimbra look or have those features, I am not sure, perhaps, but then, I am familiar with Kopano, I'll stick to it.
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@scottalanmiller
See my reply separately.I would advise you to go to www.kopano.com
look at the demo video, the actual product demo, and the products.
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@mcostan
Ah, sorry, and the delayed delivery plugin which is very useful at least to me. It is very simple, but allows me to write emails over the weekend and set the time when they will go out during the week at my preferred time.Again I am sure useful for me and perhaps not for you.
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And SMIME because these days I get bills (e.g. tax bills) delivered encrypted and I need to be able to read them.
Again comes in the Kopano community edition but not Zimbra.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
@mcostan
Ah, sorry, and the delayed delivery plugin which is very useful at least to me. It is very simple, but allows me to write emails over the weekend and set the time when they will go out during the week at my preferred time.Again I am sure useful for me and perhaps not for you.
Haven't needed that for email, but would like that for NodeBB
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
And SMIME because these days I get bills (e.g. tax bills) delivered encrypted and I need to be able to read them.
Again comes in the Kopano community edition but not Zimbra.
Ah, that's a big one. Don't have anyone using it yet, but it is a big feature.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
In addition as you say the Kopano application looks a lot slicker at least from the demos and screenshots I have seen of Zimbra.
Zimbra was the leader here for so long, I feel like they decided to rest on their laurels around 2007 or something
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
Hi, My use is perhaps not the usual user so I do understand if perhaps you do not need any of the following.
I tend to work away from the office quite a lot and I work on desktops which aren't mine, but at the client site, therefore I cannot install anything on their PC.
Therefore I need a fully integrated solution which I can replicate in the same way at home as when I am (mostly the case) on site.
That includes:
a) email of course
b) activesync support for mobile devices (free with z-push). As I have all the mobile phones synced in native protocol. This way I have everything synced on the mobile phones, including tasks, notes, contacts, email etc. etc. Natively.
c) Outlook 2016 support with Exchange integration (not IMAP, but proper activesync) (comes again with z-push). When I go home I use Outlook 2016 and I tend to see that activesync and full integration is a lot better than IMAP.
d) very important for me. Cloud storage integrated with the main webapp application. I can create e-mails from attachments to and from the cloud and when I get back home, my main PC has the files on the cloud itself. It's all integrated in webapp. I have owncloud running and I can see my files everywhere I go, within the application. They are remotely synced on the main server and on the phone when I need.
e) chat (mostly) and videoconferencing which I do with the people who are at another site. Again it needs to be embedded in the same application, not requiring any plugins or software to be installed, but simply work out of the box within Chrome or Firefox (webmeetings).My understanding of Zimbra is rather limited and I am sure some of them may be available in one shape or other. However, I did stop looking and investigating when I looked at the following webpage:
https://www.zimbra.com/email-server-software/product-edition-comparison/
And realised that most of what I need is either only in the paid editions or even in the paid editions you still have to pay for it (e.g. zimbra talk).
My usage is too limited for me to justify buying a license.
In addition as you say the Kopano application looks a lot slicker at least from the demos and screenshots I have seen of Zimbra.
All the features I have listed above are downloadable for you at the Kopano community site.
Who knows, there may be some teething issues (that I do not have perhaps right now) but I get the entire software and it works for me. I get the entire packages and integration with cloud, web conferencing etc. etc.
I do understand if your needs are different and you are looking for something else.
That's why perhaps there is more than one product on the market to satisfy different needs.
As I said I did look at Zimbra but it is simply lacking the features (at least in the community edition) and I cannot use it. If it did, I'd be very happy to use it.
There may be public domains or whatever plugins to make Zimbra look or have those features, I am not sure, perhaps, but then, I am familiar with Kopano, I'll stick to it.
Is it perfect? no. Is it working? no. Is there a community edition which is the same as the official releases? no.
As I said I do get the mainline branch, test it, and when satisfied it works, I push it to my own production, I.e. I do my own release branches.
At the end, the world isn't perfect.
If you want basic functionalities and that's all you need, then pick Zimbra. The community edition is EXACTLY the same as the paid for one, it works, all great.
however
if you want more advanced featues and you can't live with Zimbra, then unless there are other solutions (and I am happy of course to listen to those) I have only Kopano I can chose from.
It has a LOT of features that I actually NEED on a daily basis.
Yes I have to watch out to use their mainline branch as opposed to official releases, but hey... that's life I suppose.
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I'd be very very happy to look at alternatives that give me what Kopano does.
I did try a few times and I just came back to Kopano.
As I said my usercase is probably not the majority as the features I need are the most advanced.
Essentially I need to have my own office on the go at the client site with one browser (ONLY).
There is nothing else on the market that lets me do this in the community space.
At least not that I know of.
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Our posts in the community have prompted a lot of changes. Their documentation for supported OSes is totally different today than it was yesterday.
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They raced to add Ubuntu 16.04 this morning. Officially they only supported 14.04 yesterday, for example.
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frankly I do agree with Patrick, your comments aren't very helpful. If it was me in the Kopano community I wouldn't reply.
If you want to help a community the best you can do is to HELP not to slag them off.
That's at least what I try to do.
Anyway I have work to do.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
frankly I do agree with Patrick, your comments aren't very helpful. If it was me in the Kopano community I wouldn't reply.
Patrick started as pushing for us to pay. I'm not helpful because the community was rude and intentionally not helpful. Read the posts in order. I asked totally reasonable questions, got absolutely unacceptable responses.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
If you want to help a community the best you can do is to HELP not to slag them off.
I don't want the community to help, I'm evaluating if they have a good community that can help. If you want them to look like a valid product, get them to be helpful and not rude. It's not my place to placate them, they never once tried to help from the beginning.
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perhaps if you are not rude to people but you talk to them in a constructive way you will have more success.
A community is made of people trying to help. Otherwise there is no community.
That's at least what I do, with kopano or anything else.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
perhaps if you are not rude to people but you talk to them in a constructive way you will have more success.
But I had totally success, I think that that is what is missing here. I did not post rudely, if you feel that I did in my initial posts, please explain to me where that is, I because I believe that I posted very professionally and kindly without the slightest hint of rudeness.
Then I immediately got ridiculous, rude responses. How I responded after that is tough cheese, the community made their decision about how interactions there will happen. I already had what I needed to know - that it is not a community trying to help. Look at the first posts on each topic - or the CentOS one where there was no response at all until I pointed out that it was being avoided to make the rudeness in the others seem more viable.
