Ref : EHA/End User Self Help/Common IT Services setup

Writing documentation & How To’s can be trying, especially when you are trying to accommodate everyone. There are countless number of email clients available, and users justifiably have their own individual preferences. Accommodating all available email clients and keeping the documentation updated is next to impossible, so I drew up a list of features according to our requirements, shortlisted and evaluated a few before finalizing on Zimbra Desktop. Primarily we needed something supporting Calendaring, Tasks, Alarms and tasks in addition to POP email and also a few popular email clients, so that users could stay in touch with their personal email, without using up too much office time for checking personal email. (You know what happens when you open your browser)We now had users running on Linux and the Mac, so it became imperative  that the solution needed to be cross platform. It also needed to be Open source , because as a charitable organization we could not afford to buy so many copies of Office and keep upgrading them at regular intervals for more money. I tried out various other clients before finalizing on Zimbra.

Zimbra marks its POP support as beta, and it showed. POP support failed out of the box. Zimbra would try to access the server using SSL even though the SSL check-boxes were unchecked.  It also supports free web mail accounts such as Yahoo & Gmail. Hopefully this product will get better with future versions. Luckily for us, our mail server supports SSL.

Download Zimbra Desktop from here. Choose the link corresponding to your Operating System (Windows/Mac/Linux). End User documentation for Zimbra Desktop is available here.

Install Zimbra. This is straightforward for Windows and the Mac. Although I haven’t installed the Linux version, it looks like a shell script, so you might need to run..

chmod +x filename.sh to make the installer executable before running it like ./filename.sh from a command shell (Terminal) to install it.

Run Zimbra…

Click on ADD NEW ACCOUNT

Select POP from the list of Account types

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Enter the details as shown in the screenshot above & ACCEPT the “untrusted certificate”

Click Launch Desktop

You can now add any other Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail or AOL account for your personal email.

Note: You need to be online to setup an email account which seems to be a con for this product as it validates the account information before saving the settings.

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