Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop: Are You Ready for a New Email App?

Zimbra is an email, contacts and calendar in one application. It runs on Windows, Mac's and Linux.

When I downloaded Zimbra my first reaction was "such a good-looking screen!". As I've used this for a couple of days I think Zimbra may push Outlook Express and Windows Live aside. At first glance, I was distressed at the short subject column, but soon learned that by hovering my mouse over the subject, I could see way more than I see in Outlook. And I found the information in Windows Live to hook up my hotmail accounts to Zimbra, too. You can also set up AOL, Gmail and Apple email accounts (any POP or IMAP email account) in Zimbra, and have all your email in one place.

In the email section you have flags, priorities (!) and tags to mark your email. You can search your messages by folder, picture, date, person, subject or attachment. You can even save searches as virtual folders, i.e. "Matt's photos". Drag and drop messages into new folders or the trash. Automatically, you can reply with the correct 'from' address when you have multiple email accounts. The amount of storage for your emails is unlimited. And if you're offline, you can compose messages - they'll stay in your outbox until you're online again.

Highlights of the contact section includes storing all the contacts from your accounts in one place. With these contacts you can create groups and tags to organize them. You can add photos to contacts, and import new contacts from other apps as .csv files or export contacts as .csv files for backup.

The calendar is being upgraded, currently you can manage multiple color-coded calendars. You can view in day/week/work week/month/list views. Use drag and drop to change events to a different day or time. And you can import public web calendars (iCal format), like sports schedules, for example.

The new features enable Zimbra to work with Google, Microsoft, Apple, AOL and Mozilla calendars. You will have the ability to set instant messaging or SMS reminders for events and a to-do list. Eventually, Zimbra will automatically sync with Microsoft Outlook and Apple IPhone. The beta will be rolled out later this year - a handful of users got the beta on October 8th.

In all my reading about Zimbra I could not find what "Zimlets" are, but they're another feature of Zimbra. If you're tired of your email program or would like to have more features (many I have not touched on here), I suggest you try Zimbra.