Posts Tagged ‘zimbra desktop’

Zimbra Adds Reminder Zimlets

Zimbra has been gaining popularity as an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange for some time, but its real power is in its ZImlet extension functionality. Last week they added a killer Zimlet to their arsenal as well as a new Zimlet this week that will be very handy and both revolve around helping us not forget things, a problem any busy person faces. :) Last week’s Zimlet was an email reminder Zimlet. The extension allows you to set a reminder to respond to an email so it’s not forgotten. This is a great replacement to my error-prone system of marking items as unread that I need to remember to respond to. For instance, let’s say I get an email that a subscription or license to something will be expiring in a few months. Rather than placing an event in my calendar and possibly missing the reminder after the date goes by, I can set a reminder that I need to do something about that email later on. For me, this is a killer feature as I often forget to respond to emails that don’t necessarily need to be responded to right away. The second reminder Zimlet is a birthday reminder. It allows you to remind you of a birthday of one of your contacts and set multiple reminders before the birthday so you don’t have to worry about forgetting a birthday and get yourself into trouble :) Both of these new Zimlets require ZCS 5.0.12 or greater for the server-side or you can install them into Zimbra Desktop as well.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 19th, 2009

Installing Multiple Instances of Zimbra Desktop in Linux

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop is almost reaching full release status, but it still has one limitation: only one installation on a machine is supported. The problem lies in the fact that Zimbra Desktop uses a Jetty server for the backend application and each instance is configured to use the same port. We can hack Zimbra Desktop by changing the port from the default to another port on the system and then add another installation. This hack worked on Ubuntu 8.10 and should work on any Linux distro. I tried it on my MacBook, but Zimbra Desktop put a directory in the /Applications folder that contained prism and the installer didn’t allow me to continue. I haven’t tried this on Windows, but I imagine it should work in a similar way.

Disclaimer: This hack is not in any way supported by Zimbra or by the author. I am not responsible if your Zimbra Desktop data becomes unusable. Please backup your Zimbra Desktop installation before beginning if you already have data in Zimbra Desktop. Also, this hack will most likely break upgrades and have to be re-applied. A working knowledge of some Linux shell is recommended. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s begin.

1. Install Zimbra Desktop as normal.
Download the installer from Zimbra’s website and install it as normal on the first user’s account. This is the user’s account that we will change the web server ports. Once Zimbra Desktop is installed, stop the Zimbra sync services from the command line:
~/zimbra/Zimbra Desktop/Zimbra Desktop stop

You can check that the services have actually been stopped by running:
ps aux | grep zimbra

2. Edit Jetty and Prism config files.
Open up a terminal window in Linux, ‘cd’ to the Zimbra Desktop directory (~/zimbra/Zimbra Desktop) and find all config files containing the port number:
grep -r 7633 * | grep -v logs

The output will display the file name followed by the line that contains “7633″ which is the default listening port for Zimbra Desktop. You can ignore any line that says “Binary file <filename> matches”. The following files should have been returned and will need to be edited:
conf/localconfig.xml
jetty/etc/jetty.xml
jetty/webapps/service/WEB-INF/web.xml
jetty/webapps/zimbra/js/Startup1_2_all.js
jetty/webapps/zimbra/js/NewWindow_2_all.js
jetty/webapps/zimbra/js/zimbraMail/core/ZmZimbraMail.js
Zimbra Desktop.webapp/webapp.ini

Open up each file with the editor of your choice and change the text “7633″ with “7634″ or some other port of your choosing. Just make sure they are all the same.

3. Start Zimbra Desktop again.
You can now start the instance for user:
~/zimbra/Zimbra Desktop/Zimbra Desktop start

If all config files have been changed, the Zimbra Desktop sync engine will start as normal. You can launch the client from the desktop shortcut, or you can connect using another browser. To get the URL to connect to, consult the file: ~/zimbra/Zimbra Desktop/Zimbra Desktop.webapp/webapp.ini and look for the line “uri=”. Otherwise, you will receive an error from Jetty saying that you are unauthorized. If you receive an error, be sure to check that all files have been changed by running the grep comand at the beginning of step 2.

4. Login as second user and install.
Login as the second user that you want to install Zimbra Desktop as. You will then be able to install Zimbra Desktop as normal.

5. Rinse and repeat.
You can stop at this point if you don’t have any other users or if you don’t plan on doing upgrades. I haven’t tested this with upgrades, but I imagine that an upgrade will return it to the normal ports. In which case the upgrade will fail and data loss could result. I would recommend repeating steps 1-3 and changing the port in step 3 to 7635 (or whatever port you should choose).

That’s it! You can now have multiple users with their own Zimbra Desktop instance on your computer. Again.. this how-to is a total hack and not supported by anyone, but it worked for me. Upgrades to the software will most likely break the setup and could result in data loss. Of course you’re already doing this, but be sure to run a backup before trying any upgrades to the software.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Feb 7th, 2009

Migrating Mail from Zimbra Desktop to IMAP Server

The Zimbra Desktop mail client is a great mail client that gives the look and feel of the Zimbra Collabroation Suite, but the migration path out of the client has been less than easy. I wrote up a quick tutorial on steps that I took to help someone pull their email they had downloaded via POP into ZD and had gotten stuck there.

To do the export of the data, I used the built-in export utility inside of Zimbra Desktop. For the migration into an IMAP account (or a Zimbra Collaboration Server account) I used Thunderbird with the MboxImport enhanced add-on. I’m assuming you have already setup the account in Zimbra Desktop and pulled down the emails you want to export. I’m using Mac OS X to do the export, though it should work assuming you can get a file to extract the gzipped tarball from Zimbra Desktop.

First, I started with exporting from Zimbra Desktop. I went to the Account Setup page using the bottom on the top-right.

In the account setup screen, click on the account you want to migrate.

On the bottom-left, click on the Manage Data button.

Click on Export.

Type in the name you want to give the file, then click on Export.

Then you’ll be prompted to save the file. Save the file wherever you would like. Mine saved to my Downloads directory.

For some reason, it didn’t actually name the file the way it was supposed to when I downloaded it it, so I renamed the file to example.tar.gz and double-clicked it to extract. If you’re using Windows, 7-zip can extract the file.

When you extract the file, you can open the folder and find directories for each folder of the mail you had. Inside those folders, there will be .eml files for each email. If you have more than 500 messages in a folder, the export breaks them up into multiple folders and append a number to the end of the name.

Now we’re ready to import into Thunderbird. It’s useful at this point if you account is setup already, but not necessary. First, we’ll have to create a temporary local folder to import into. Right-click on the Local Folders in Thunderbird and click on New Folder. You can name it whatever you like, it will be cleared out eventually anyway.

Then, select the new folder we created. Then, in the Thunderbird menu, go to Tools -> Import/Export in mbox/eml format -> Import all eml files from a directory -> also from its sottodirectories.

When prompted, navigate to your extract Zimbra Desktop export directory and click Choose.

The utility will import your messages into the temporary directory.

Depending upon the server that you are using, you may have to be careful with drag-and-dropping your messages into your IMAP account. You can do it, but beware: it may mess up timestamps on messages. For Zimbra we have a little trick we can use. When setting up the account, simply append “/tb” to the end of your username. For my example, my email address was example@whatan00b.com, so my username that I used to authenticate was “example@whatan00b.com/tb”. Once you know how about the consequences of drag-and-drop inside your mail client, just drag all of your messages into their appropriate folders. Here’s my messages now in the Zimbra web client:

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (11) : Nov 3rd, 2008