Multiple Front-End Solutions for Email and Calendaring?

USSJoin asks: "I am looking for a solution which I can install on my servers, that will allow me to run my email, calendars, to-do lists, and other groupware-ish functions. Specifically, I want a solution which allows equal access through the web and over an SSH session -- so that everything I do on one is accessible through the other. After extensive googling, I found Zimbra, which is nice and AJAX-ified, but doesn't include a to-do, and doesn't seem to have any way to deal with calendar access that is not made through the web front-end. I also found Citadel, but it seems like while it's a cute solution, it's quite cobbled-together and filled with hacks. This is especially true with its major Telnet interface, which seems dangerous to me. Has anyone on Slashdot had the same problem? What solutions have you found? Are Citadel or Zimbra really great and I just don't see their true possibilities? Are there other things I should be looking at, or different ways to approach this problem?"

Comments

Horde!

[Cybersonic]

Cant go wrong with Horde! www.horde.org

Re:Horde!

[Anonymous Coward]

/cheer

Alliance sucks!

Re:Horde!

[rblancarte]

I was going to say the same thing. I mean, this does everything he wants. I use SSH access to do E-Mail, Calendar and todo lists.

Great solution.

RonB

Re:Horde!

[tyldis]

And they are also working on a new app called DIMP which is basicly IMP (the email app of the suite) with AJAX. Hoping it will be the new groupware solution for my org within a year.

Re:Horde!

[CastrTroy]

I use Horde because it comes with my hosting, and it's better than the others, neomail and squirrel mail. I still think it's pretty sub par. I think that although webmail is nice to get at your mail when you can't access it otherwise, it doesn't really compare with have a full fledged application. GMail is about as close as it gets, and that still has some short comings.

Consider an SSH tunnel

[Pyromage]

I'm guessing that you need it available via SSH because it's behind a firewall somewhere. Have you considered using a good web-based tool, and then using SSH to tunnel in?

Re:Consider an SSH tunnel

[Anonymous Coward]

> Have you considered using a good web-based tool, and then using SSH to tunnel in?

...perhaps the web-based interface will work with Lynx (ssh in then run lynx)?

Re:Consider an SSH tunnel

[Pyromage]

Excellent thought; if not lynx, then try elinks, a similar terminal-based browser that supports tables and frames. I am using elinks as I write this.

Re:Consider an SSH tunnel

[martinultima]

I'd say an SSH tunnel probably wouldn't be a bad idea; if you use Windows (or don't like Linux's command-line SSH interface), grab a copy of PuTTY and set up an SSH tunnel forwarding local port 8000 to "127.0.0.1:80" on the server – or whatever values would be appropriate for your case. I used it for quite a while before my school district finally caught on that I was accessing my Linux box at home :-) And doing an SSH tunnel has the added advantage of not having to use an insecure HTTP connection, and you don't have to deal with setting up SSL on your server if all you need's a simple calendar app.

Re:Consider an SSH tunnel

[martinultima]

Sorry, typo in the URL – meant http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty

open-xchange

[Blasphemy]

http://www.openxchange.org/ - Open Xchange should make your list of "almost what you need". It has a great interface and excellent functionality. I don't know of any command line tools, but I don't think it would be too difficult to make some. I've never tried $ links http://localhost/ for open-xchange access, but it should give you some decent functionality.

Re:open-xchange

[Corbets]

That link should be www.openxchange.com, not .org. Follow that one and I don't think you'll quite get what you were looking for. :)

Re:open-xchange

[malachid69]

Are you sure it isn't http://www.open-xchange.org/ ?

Re:open-xchange

[Blasphemy]

openxchange.com is the commercial version (paid support, etc). open-xchange.org is correct.

Re:open-xchange

[newbrier]

The couple bucks that OX charges for the supported small business version is well worth it. With its web based admin tools and a stable release are two strong reasons to take the plung. There is a great community of support around the project to help troubleshoot any special or advanced needs.

Scalix is the answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Battle of the Ajax Mail Packages
By James Turner on Thu, 2006-01-26

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8722

Sunbird and iCal hosting?

[8086]

I've been using Mozilla Sunbird and iCal hosting (icalx.com) for a while - it does to-do's and calendars pretty well, synchronizing back and forth. After a lot of searching and trying things out, this seemed to work the best for me. Also, there's a new Outlook plugin called Remote Calendars (http://sourceforge.net/projects/remotecalendars/) which does the same thing as Sunbird on Outlook.
The only downside here is the lack of SSH, but I figured being able to read and update my calendar from any PC, and read my calendar from just about anything, and having my calendar in a standard format for my iPod is totally worth the lack of security.

Hula?

[Trelane]

Is Hula maybe what you seek? If not, is it hackable to what you want it to be?

Re:Hula?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Funny, it seems that the idea behind Hula is really a complete ripoff of the idea behind Citadel, and the Citadel team has been pushing this concept since 1998 or so. Moving from corporate-focused groupware towards the modern idea of social software isn't something you can retrofit; it has to be the heart and soul of the design.

Hula only exists because some immature but influential people at Ximian (who call themselves 'Novell' these days) have a serious case of Not Invented Here syndrome.

Zimbra has REST API's

[khenriks]

Zimbra has a host of REST API's. These would allow you to access all your Zimbra data via SSH when needed. You could also just set up an SSH tunnel to get to the web UI, unless by SSH you mean command line only.

If it's just for you, KDE has the answer.

[twitter]

Most of the Kontact member programs know how to use sftp. I have my contacts and calendar that way, though I don't use the calendar much. I first put contact pictures up for myself, then the whole std.vcf. The pictures are still on the sftp server, a mighty 90MHz Pentium. Kontact sucks it up as a tmp file which it puts back when you finish. This works very well with the version that now ships with Debian Etch. I keep a local copy on the laptop, in case I don't have network access, but that's rare and all my contacts stay in sync across any number of laptops and desktops I use. If I'm not on line, I just uncheck the networked file. Nice eh?

Email itself, I have not tackled yet. IMAP, obviously, goes where I go but I leave PoP accounts alone on the road. I'm going to be reading what others do about this.

OpenGroupware.org

[whoever57]

OpenGroupware is a web-based groupware solution (with a closed-source, non-free outlook plugin).

I have installed it on a couple of networks. The biggest probelm seems to be that there is no reliable calendar client that will work with it (other than aoutlook through the connector). Sunbird and other calendar clients crash or don't properly create appointments.

Oh, and it does not provide an MTA, but there are plenty of good solutions for this.

Webdav plus iCal and Thunderbird...

[bergeron76]

Just install webdav on one of your webservers and point iCal (and/or Thunderbird) at the remote .ics file.

Re:Webdav plus iCal and Thunderbird...

[Anonymous Coward]

iCal does not allow you to have a centrally located calendar you can manage from multiple locations unless you have a .mac account. That is, only one machine can "publish" a calendar. This really stinks if you use many computers and want to manage the same calendar. There are some horrible hacks I've seen for this on macosxhints that basically involve putting your .ics file on a remote server, and then symbolically linking it to the local .ics file to "fool" iCal into managing a remote calendar. This is, of course, a disaster if multiple users try to change the calendar (or numerous other "sync breaking" scenarios), since there is no file locks involved here and its a total kludge. Anyone know if there's a webdav-baed work around for this, I'd love to hear about it.

Citadel

[mcbridematt]

I also found Citadel, but it seems like while it's a cute solution, it's quite cobbled-together and filled with hacks. This is especially true with its major Telnet interface, which seems dangerous to me.

Dangerous? No it ain't, unless you think all classic BBS'es are dangerous.. Webcit (the web interface) is very young compared to Citadel itself.

(Citadel also isn't bloatware compared to Kolab and others, and I personally like not having to install 65535 seperate components and libraries just to get something working)

I've been using Citadel for some time and I've even done some hacking on it. Someday, i'll make sure my NNTP support addon actually comes into existance :-)

However, the issue of a decent client for Citadel is one annoyance. Kontact and others support Citadel via GroupDAV (which is firewall friendly) but once you go beyond OSS land there isn't much choice, particularly if you want to sync with mobile devices.

Re:Citadel

[mdfst13]

OP: "This is especially true with its major Telnet interface, which seems dangerous to me."

P: "Dangerous? No it ain't,"

Telnet is inherently dangerous because it requires sending passwords in clear text across the wire. If you want to argue that this telnet based interface is not dangerous, you need to explain why it doesn't require sending passwords in clear text. I.e. why authentication is not important or how it encrypts the authentication (which would have to run on top of the telnet connection).

This can certainly be true in some cases. For example, the common day timer application does not require authentication to return the system time. However, if you are talking about making edits over telnet, that does in fact require authentication. How do you verify identity? You can't use the options telnet gives you, as they are not secure; you have to build your own.

There is also the question of whether or not the data needs to be encrypted. I can think of a number of situations where I would not want my email/scheduling info available in clear text.

Re:Citadel

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent down. It expressly mentions using ssh in the faq: http://www.citadel.org/index.php?option=com_conten t&task=view&id=37&Itemid=38

Re:Citadel

[RedHat Rocky]

Second. I've setup Citadel, one can use ssh as the incoming method as well as https.

Nothing to see here, move along.

And what about Palm Sync?

[angst_ridden_hipster]

I've been dreaming of a system like this. Especially if it supports sync to a Palm/Treo.

And while we're at it, I'd like it to handle shared address book / address list functionality too.

Re:And what about Palm Sync?

[KD5UZZ]

NOT Palm sync, SyncML. SyncML would allow Palms, cell phones, and a host of other devices to sync.

Re:And what about Palm Sync?

[darkone]

FirstClass ( http://www.firstclass.com/ ), I mentioned this software in the main reply, but it also supports Palm Sync (syncs mail, calendar, addressbook, todo-list, and memos). You can share calendars, addresbooks, and conferences (more intelligent than folders).

  Shared addressbooks do not sync up, but you could place your addresbook on your secretaries/spouses FirstClass Desktop, and give them permissions to view, or add addresses.

  It is a little expensive (not compared to Exchange) but there is a free 5 user version (server and client run on Windows, Linux, and OSX)

  If your office upgrades to the FirstClass Voice Services you can listen to your voicemail in Email, view faxes in EMail, or listen to your Email/calendar/addressbook over the phone! Awsome stuff!
  -Ben

FirstClass Groupware

[darkone]

FirstClass Groupware http://www.firstclass.com/ is not opensource, or free (except the 5 user version), but the server AND the clients will run on Windows, OSX, or Linux. There are also web and telnet interfaces available. This is a great GroupWare platform, with EASY client setup, and the three platforms look identical to the end user. This software also allows database (ODBC) integration and a VoiceMail piece.

Re:FirstClass Groupware

[GrigorPDX]

I'll second that. I've been running FirstClass servers for more than 10 years now. Rock solid stable, mature, scales like there's no tomorrow, easy as sin to admin. Yeah, it's not FLOSS, but it's still damn good stuff. And it's made by a company who actually *listens* to its customers - I was chatting with one of their lead developers not less than 10 minutes ago. It's worth your time checking it out.

Re:FirstClass Groupware

[Anonymous Coward]

FirstClass sucks. it has hardcode limits on the size of inboxes/folders. Have a few clients that used it -- they like to save everything forever and with the hardlimits senders get "unable to deliver" to them "mailbox full" bounces almost daily. Stay away from it -- if you're going to pay money, why fumble? use Exchange or Lotus Notes - the top two commercial products that do all of this and more.

Re:ALERT! Google Blog Censorship?

[numbski]

Uh, they're all accessible to me....?

Realism

[aaronl]

What you're looking for is the same as a whole lot of other people are.

There are a few open source kits out there that are decent, but none of them are really done. Kolab and OpenGroupware look nice, but they have extremely limited client support. Kolab doesn't even have a fully functional web interface, instead relying on KDE's Kontact. They will both play well with Outlook on Windows through a for-money connector. Citadel has many of the features, but lacks *any* real client. I would love if the OSS kits worked, but people are much more interested in adding toys than finishing the project in good stages.

Sometimes the right answer is to spend money. Exchange, Notes/Domino, and GroupWise will do very close to what you want. There are a number of similar kits, like Kerio's mail server, Scalix (commerical OpenGroupware), OpenExchange, and whatever OpenMail became called.

As much as people think web apps are so wonderful, they really need to understand that they are not a panacea. Working in a web app for major use is quite a total pain; they just don't work as nicely as a native application. The interfaces are slow and there is no capability for offline operation. If the only fully-functional interface to something like this is a web app, then you have to largely discount it as an option. Users will hate you for forcing them to it.

If Evolution ran on Windows, you would be fairly done with the search. The devs haven't gotten around to making this a reality, so you are stuck in an annoying place. If you are looking for only yourself, then any of these solutions is probably sufficient. If you are looking for a product normal users will have to deal with, then look to spend money on software.

Re:Realism

[Anonymous Coward]

Working in a web app for major use is quite a total pain; they just don't work as nicely as a native application. ... Users will hate you for forcing them to it.

This is so true. Having first hand experience from a midsize org where the IT department thought it was clever to have web only interface for mail/calendar/etc. For security and ease of admin reasons. For all the users it is constant pain, for the reasons you list. The IT department doesn't see this or care, they have a solution that work very well _for them_. The pointy hairs believes the IT department's technical arguments that it is necessary. Some IT departments seems to have the attitude that if it wasn't for all the users causing them problems, they could run a really neat operation.

Re:Realism

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

I concur. Mom and Dad have been using Outlook for years, and Windows Small Business Server licenses were relatively cheap, so I ended up going with Exchange. One of the nicer features of Exchange's calendar is that when you send invites to POP/IMAP clients (one of my users has a Mac), it will convert the invite into a link to Outlook Web Access. OWA in Exchange 2003 is much, much better than in previous versions. At the time, the OpenExchange stuff looked interesting but not quite production ready.

Re:Realism

[Gribflex]

Also, OWA is much better in IE than it is in Firefox or Opera (it makes me very sad, but it's true). So if you are going to test it out to see how you like it -- try it in both IE and Firefox (or your browser of choice).

The Horde web site seems disorganized.

[Futurepower(R)]

The Horde web site seems disorganized. There seems to be no demo.

I wish Open Source software authors were more careful about naming their software. Horde means crowd, with a negative connotation. Generally a horde is a group of poorly educated people, often savages.

Re:The Horde web site seems disorganized.

[dbIII]

I wish Open Source software authors were more careful about naming their software. Horde means crowd

The roof above me is held up with a truss with a gusset plate. Oil is found with the assistance of six meter long devices called vibrators. Just take a mature view of things and don't let names that may have several meanings bother you - even "unix" is a silly name.

Re:The Horde web site seems disorganized.

[ecloud]

I bet they got it confused with hoard.

Re:The Horde web site seems disorganized.

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally a horde is a group of poorly educated people, often savages.

That sums up end-users.

OBM

[Anonymous Coward]

OBM is a free web base groupware and crm solution with Outlook (non free) and Evolution (sunbird to come) connectors for calendar, contact and tasks.
It doesn't provide email but can be set along with postfix, cyrus (or others) and IMP (or squirrel mail).
It stores everything in db and is very scalable. Connectors access the server via webservices.

Call for convergence

[prestwich]

Hi,
    I've been looking at the free calendaring disaster for a while now - and it is; there are
perhaps 5-10 different packages, none of which interoperate; some very nice clients that
only talk to really crap servers and some very nice servers with poor clients.

Lets get some convergence here - please can we actually lock the
    Zimbra, Open Exchange, Sunbird, Open Groupware, Kolab
(I must have missed some....)
guys in a cave without food for a while until they actually agree to work together?
For a concession I'll let caffeinated beverages in and a few computers with a copy
of all known calendaring specs.

(please toss in a couple of guys with MS programming experience so we can get Outlook
to talk to the servers).

Re:Call for convergence

[Anonymous Coward]

> I've been looking at the free calendaring disaster for a while now

Yep, lots of crap out there. But blaming the free scene seems kind of unfair, since the "professionals" don't do any better.

Yahoo Mail? Nice calender, but it doesn't import or export, and it only interoperates with Yahoo Mail, not with Outlook, Netscape, whatever.

Outlook? Ok, the client is functional, the server works, but it doesn't interoperate either. If you look at the invitation without Outlook (that is in ASCII), you can't even parse it.

Of course some are even worse. Mozilla Sunbird can't even read its own invitations, at least not in my environment :-)

> Lets get some convergence here - please can we actually lock the guys in a cave without food for a while until they actually agree to work together?

Yes please. It took ages with the office pacakages, but with the OpenDocument format it finally seems to happen.

For calenders, we have vCalender and iCalender as possible standards, but nobody seems to get it right.

Re:Call for convergence

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I've been looking at the free calendaring disaster for a while now - and it is; there are perhaps 5-10 different packages, none of which interoperate; some very nice clients that only talk to really crap servers and some very nice servers with poor clients.

Funny, that's exactly the problem that GroupDAV is supposed to solve. On the client side, Kontact and a few others support it; on the server side, Citadel and OpenGroupware.org (plus a few others) support it. It's just a matter of getting the other major players on board.

Connotations matter...

[Futurepower(R)]

Connotations matter, even if they don't matter a lot. The Beatles were successful even though their band name sounded like an insect. However, it is a statistical fact that few products with a trick or negative name become successful.

Re:Connotations matter...

[ChrisJones]

Most people are too dumb to know what horde means anyway. Of far more concern is a discussion overheard by a non-techie that involves things like "oh I just use the gimp for that" ;)

Re:Connotations matter...

[Futurepower(R)]

I'd never heard that about Fluke. LOL.

Re:Connotations matter...

[eno2001]

Let me guess... former marketroid? ;P To a lot of us it's not about the image or name or other superficial properties. It just comes down to a simple question: "Does it work for me"? I worked for someone once who objected to using the 'blat' SMTP agent simply because they didn't want something called "blat" to be used in their organization. Silly reasoning.

The article's title should be...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Battle of two mostly proprietary AJAX solutions."

Overall, it certainly was a good article, but I *know* that there are some OSS projects out there, and I wish some of them had been reviewed as well. As for Zimbra and Scalix, they both seem decent... but I wish they were easier to install.

Re:The article's title should be...

[Achromatic1978]

Is it just me, or does Zimbra have the ability to bring a powerful server to its knees? I own a server in a datacentre, a fairly decent box - Dual Xeon 2.8s, 2gb ram, and 160gb of raid1'ed sata, running centos 4.2.

With near zero load, Zimbra ground that thing to a halt. In between the Java Web UI, etc... it'd take up to 30 seconds to change pages.

Switch back to lighttpd, Communigate Pro, and the thing doesn't bat an eyelid, whatever the load put on it.

PHPGrouware and eGroupware

[JoeCommodore]

These two caught my interest a while back, looks like it does what you want and more. eGroupware is a fork of PHP groupware, itseems eGroupware is most active.

microsoft exchange?

[way2trivial]

I read, and reread, the 'ask' header, and don't see where it must be open source..

have you looked at exchange? or microsoft small buisness server?

Re:microsoft exchange?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how exactly are you supposed to use that from a tty?

Re:microsoft exchange?

[way2trivial]

TTY? I don't see that term in the original 'ask' as part of the spec.....

basecamp

[quiddity]

i think basecamp is what you want

Benefits of Citadel

[athos-mn]

I'm no programmer, so I can't addressed the "cobbled-together" comment, but from an administrative point-of-view, I must disagree.

I've never had an easier installation of such a program. Likewise, updating is just as easy. The telnet interface takes its root from the 300-baud days, and isn't necessary for it to work - it's no more or less secure than anything that uses telnet (which is to say, not secure). However, there's ssh and its own text client (which is quite nice) to get around that.

Re:Benefits of Citadel

[fleeb_fantastique]

Ditto what athos-mn is saying here.

I am a programmer, and I've occasionally looked over the Citadel code. It's not a hodge-podge at all... it's reasonably well designed to handle a variety of protocols, to include its own proprietary protocol, using a kind of plug-in architecture. Frankly, although I don't generally like C code, I find this code is very well thought out.

Furthermore, it consolidates your services to two executables (the Citadel server and the web interface server), rather than the several you'd otherwise have if you tried to cobble something together yourself (smtp, pop3, imap, something proprietary, and perhaps an html server like apache with whatever mods you'd need thereafter).

As a backend solution, it's probably the finest offering available for open source software. It's absurdly easy to maintain, easy to update, easy to install (http://easyinstall.citadel.org/ and easy to back up or restore (copy the database files, even while Citadel is running, then copy the database logs), and the Citadel folks take problems seriously.

I wonder if the original poster could kindly expand on that hodge-podge comment... I know that the folks who work on Citadel take the issue very seriously, and would love to understand what problems someone may be having with it. From what I've seen of their reaction to people's issues in the support forum on http://uncensored.citadel.org/ they take their offering very seriously, so I'm sure they'd love to more clearly understand any issues you might be having with it.

Admittedly, there still isn't a really great front-end that takes advantage of all of Citadel's abilities. The Citadel team has opted to focus more on developing the WebCit interface to help deal with this problem, as I understand it. The team has tried working with some others towards a client-side solution, but those efforts have not quite taken off yet. Still, I think there's some serious effort underway to make everything work more smoothly, they're just not quite there yet.

Easy solution: disable Citadel's "telnet" UI.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

It's actually not a "telnet" UI per se, but simply a text mode user interface. If you don't like it, then all you have to do is ... not use it! Keep in mind that Citadel works in a lot of different use cases. The text mode UI is really intended for BBS applications, so if you're not running a message board on your Citadel server then it's not really the client for you. You'd be better served running WebCit (the AJAX-enabled web interface) or even some of the fat clients such as Kontact that are well-integrated with Citadel.

How about Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun not to long ago announced all of their server software is free (as in beer for now) and then you can pay for support.

Their messaging server does shared contacts, appointments, to-do lists, has and Outlook connector and even ties in instant messaging.
http://www.sun.com/software/products/messaging_srv r/index.xml

I have no idea if this works on a small scale, but I'm going to try it out once I get some free time. Googling for anyone that has tried it gets me know where.

squirrelmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you thought about http://www.squirrelmail.org/ ? Sounds like what you are after

Consider Emacs

[Bob Uhl]

Do you need web access, or are you willing to deal with SSH-only? Or might you consider using one tool for the web and another via SSH?

If so, I'd recommend emacs. Gnus is an excellent mail client/newsreader, and emacs also offers calendaring functionality out of the box. Planner mode offers to-do lists, personal wikis and more. It's pretty sweet!

OpenACS and dotLRN

[aquarian]

There's a finished product based on OpenACS called dotLRN -- an intranet-in-a-box for educational use. Email, message boards, calendars, and file sharing are all very well integrated. Try http://www.openacs.org/

Kerio Mail Server is Groupware

[johnjones]

Simple you can create calendars, share folders and contacts

all work with full support for Outlook !
plus sync your Apple address book and use Apple iCal (if you dont want to use entourage in exchange mode)

kerio

regards

John Jones