An integrated Email soltion for Linux

Zimbra!

A number of other non-Microsoft alternatives have started to appear within the last five years ago, with varying degrees of success, the current lead is a product called Zimbra. This is available in both commercial and free forms and was so good it was snapped up last year by Yahoo!

What do you get, well pretty much everything you'd expect and a number of options you might  not.

• Email, available via IMAP, POP, or a very smooth AJAX client that runs inside your web-browser

  (webmail, but not as you know it ...)

• Calendaring, Contacts with the ability to have multiple instances and share them between users.

  (useful for shared / Office calenders and company address books)

• Tasks, as per outlook this is a feature not often seen on alternative solutions

• Documents and "the Briefcase", a number of options for creating / editing / storing documents online

• RSS newsfeed integration allows you to create RSS streams and mix them with your mail folders

• Tagging, the ability to add tags to emails then view mails by tag

• Full message filtering, this is powerful stuff, probably more so than the filtering available on all other solutions

• Multiple personalities, multiple signatures, it will automatically detect who a mail was sent "to" (if you handle multiple email addresses) and use a relevant pre-defined persona. It also handles external POP accounts if you need to import your email from elsewhere.

• Shared folders, have email delivered to one user / mailbox, then allow other users to see the mailbox based on a shared access control list.

• Extensions (Zimlets) do all sorts of nice things like automatically pick up on dates and phone number inside your emails and give you the option to present maps or even dial the number (if you have an appropriate Asterisk phone system) at the click of a button.
  

I probably missed a few details, but you get the idea.

As an ex-Exchange / Outlook user this will easily pass for a replacement, and after using it for an extended period, I'd never go back. There are just too many nice bells and whistles that I've not seen anywhere else.

For the real tech heads out there, you can get an LDAP extension that will effectively let you use Zimbra as your network user manager for both Linux and Windows based systems. We use it to authenticate network logins from Windows servers in addition to Linux/LDAP logins and even website based LDAP user accounts in Zope/Plone.

Then there's a new SugarCRM plugin that allows you to synchronise calendar and contact information with Zimbra, giving you a proper mail client for your Relationship management package. (Sugar's email package really doesn't cut it ...)

All in all , I don't think Microsoft can your this .. unless of course they buy Yahoo!