Recently it was reported that Yahoo is looking to sell Zimbra, a software development company focused on building open-source email and collaboration software—a Microsoft Exchange alternative. Many look at this as a good move for Yahoo, as they look to focus on their core strategy as a media company.
But what does this mean for Zimbra’s 50 million users and customers? For those facing uncertainty, we’d like to offer some help. So today, we are introducing The Rackspace Rescue Plan for Zimbra customers, and we will be running with this until the fate of Zimbra is decided. We want to make it easy to move to Rackspace email services, for those who might be interested in moving off Zimbra’s platform.
Here’s what we are offering with our Rescue Plan:
- Free Microsoft Exchange or Rackspace Email for three months
- Free email migration performed by our migration experts
- Fanatical Support® around the clock, as always
Interested in taking advantage of this opportunity? Give us a call, email us, or chat with us and let us know you’d like to take advantage of our Rescue Plan. We will walk you through all the steps to make this a painless transition and help you find some relief during this uncertain time.
The Fine Print
Rackspace will waive the monthly fee for three months for each Microsoft Exchange or Rackspace Email mailbox that is purchased as a part of this promotion. Customers will be asked to submit a form, along with proof that your domain was using Zimbra (i.e., a pdf/screenshot of a Zimbra account, a receipt or invoice for service). And of course, we reserve the right to end this promotion at any time.
Tags: Fanatical Support, microsoft exchange, migration, rackspace email, yahoo, zimbra
Please don’t let Microsoft get hold of Zimbra. It was so nice.
DD
Exchange is so last millenium. Zimbra really is so forward looking and futuristic. It is a shame that technology like this isn’t rewarded based on its merits.
Zimbra isn’t perfect, but if you need enterprise calendaring and don’t want MS-Exchange (and all the other crap that demands), we haven’t found any other viable answer. OX may prove to be viable, only time will tell.
Who in their right mind would I want to switch to Exchange?
If I thought there was a problem with Zimbra, at least I would look for anything but exchange.
“an attempt at a Microsoft Exchange alternative, if you will.”
I was kinda surprised at that negative tone this post started with about Zimbra (I have no views on the product either way) but then realized it was because you actually want to cross(/up) sell people to a *different* stack. Possibly (back to) Exchange.
Zimbra is open source (the idea that Yahoo can own it is kinda funny, actually) and so even if they sell it the community will continue to keep it alive if it is worth saving.
Given that many Zimbra customers also host their installs with Yahoo, it strikes me RS would be better placed to offer migration to Zimbra on RS than a different stack – perhaps with RS offering to help maintain the open source project/fork of it.
Does Rackspace email support IMAP CONDSTORE and IMAP COMPRESS extension which Zimbra supports ? This helps reduce IMAP bandwidth usage. Thunderbird 3 supports this
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401673
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436151
@Ben — Thanks for the feedback and comment. Let me be clear we weren’t trying to spin the Zimbra offering in a negative light. After reading over the post I can see how that comment may come across, so I updated the post to remove that negative tone. We just want to help offer choices in the mist of confusion in the marketplace. The open-source community may be keep Zimbra alive, but of course there are no guarantees.
Up to this point we haven’t made Zimbra a choice in our different hosted offerings simply because we haven’t seen the demand from our customers/prospects to offer it. If we saw demand from customers or potential customers in the marketplace we would take a much closer look at offering this as a choice for customers.
@Yusuf — I am looking into this here with our development team. I will let you know as soon as I found out if this is supported or not.