Any free Zimbra based email services?

**ReuvenNY** · 21 Jul 2007, 12:51 PM

Someone mentioned a free Zimbra based email service based in the UK - http://mail.privatemail.me.uk/zimbra/mail
I love the interface, but it's a small account (20 Mb I believe) and a complex domain to use - xxxx@privatemail.me.uk
Anyone knows of other, larger free Zimbra accounts?

nbarr · 21 Jul 2007, 02:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ReuvenNY

Someone mentioned a free Zimbra based email service based in the UK - http://mail.privatemail.me.uk/zimbra/mail
I love the interface, but it's a small account (20 Mb I believe) and a complex domain to use - xxxx@privatemail.me.uk
Anyone knows of other, larger free Zimbra accounts?

I have to agree, the privatemail.me.uk domain is a bit of a cumbersome name.

There is http://www.capazoo.com/
It is free, and it is larger (1GB) , but I can't imagine using it myself. It's a cartoonish environment and a great deal of screen space is wasted unnecessarily on the email screen. But for whatever it's worth ...

jdtaylor · 21 Jul 2007, 08:33 PM

You should be able to get an upgrade if you wish, just let the Privatemail admin know and they should be able to help you out.

xmailer · 22 Jul 2007, 03:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nbarr

I have to agree, the privatemail.me.uk domain is a bit of a cumbersome name.

And apparently a "cumbersome" interface as well, at least enough so that I haven't yet been successful in accessing my account. It hasn't yet succeeded in loading, and as often as not I haven't even been able to get the login screen to load.

Quote:

There is http://www.capazoo.com/
It is free, and it is larger (1GB) , but I can't imagine using it myself. It's a cartoonish environment and a great deal of screen space is wasted unnecessarily on the email screen. But for whatever it's worth ...

I agree that it isn't a particularly appealing environment, at least not for anyone older than about the age of 10 or 12, I would think. But, unlike prvatemail.me.uk, if a little slow starting while loading all the silly graphics, at least it is usable with my computer. And has fairly good features too compared to a lot of the other recent "showy" webmail interfaces which ultimately offer little or nothing of practical usefulness other than a fancy looking interface.

However, based on my personal experience, it has a rather short "inactivity period", and previously used user names are apparently made available to others immediately after an unused account is deleted, or not long after, which suggests the risk that another user might end up receiving one's own personal email if one loses their account without realizing it, or before having time to apprise their correspondents. I'm not sure I'd want to entrust my email to a service which shows so little regard for its users' privacy.

King Of Email · 22 Jul 2007, 08:11 PM

There is always of course Kaxy.com. Kaxy is a Zimbra based free email service with "unlimited" storage. This service is widely advertised all over the internet as a free100MB email service, which it what it used to be before it went to the Zimbra interface. Original Kaxy account holders who did not login for a sufficient amount of time had their accounts erased when the new interface was initiated, so some formerly taken usernames may still be available. However, now for the bad news. Kaxy's Zimbra interface is extremely slow (when it works) and delays in messages sent and received can be unreasonably long. Since the last time I reviewed Kaxy's service, the Zimbra interface has been significantly simplified, representing either a newer or different version of the original interface.

Unfortunately, this simplification has not improved the speed of inbox navigation which is the biggest problem with this service. If Kaxy is any representation of the overall performance of the Zimbra interface, then Zimbra can keep it. I don't have time to sit and wait while it does what most other webmail interfaces can do in a fraction of the time. Apparently the owners of Kaxy are concerned with the performance of the free email otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to retool the inbox. My only question is whether the poor performance lies with the host or is inherent in the Zimbra email application itself. Kaxy before Zimbra worked much faster and was much more reliable. At this point, I only monitor this service, not regularly use it or rely on it.

jdtaylor · 22 Jul 2007, 11:01 PM

I believe it could well be Zimbra, it runs slow everywhere else I have tried as well and may be an indication it needs a very fast server or something but at the moment if they are trying to run it on existing slow servers this may be the problem.

xmailer · 22 Jul 2007, 11:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jdtaylor

You should be able to get an upgrade if you wish, just let the Privatemail admin know and they should be able to help you out.

The problem is, as far as I can tell upgrades to the free Privatermail account aren't free, therefore this wouldn't fit the request for free Zimbra based email services. And given the fact that the free service hasn't yet worked at all for me (so thus far I'm not even sure whether my account, which I registered for at least a couple weeks ago, was ever even set up), of course it would be foolish to consider payng for an upgrade to an account which I haven't even been able to log into.

beq · 21 Oct 2007, 12:12 PM

I haven't tried it myself, but I think Brinkster's free webhosting packages (longtime resource for budding web developers, with no ads) include a 10MB Zimbra mailbox? Can someone confirm?

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/show...502#post433198

xmailer · 22 Oct 2007, 12:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by beq

I haven't tried it myself, but I think Brinkster's free webhosting packages (longtime resource for budding web developers, with no ads) include a 10MB Zimbra mailbox? Can someone confirm?

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/show...502#post433198

While the service claims that the free webhosting packages include a 10MB email account as well as (or as an alternative to?) email forwarding, from what I can tell the free hosting plans themselves are a pure blatant "bait and switch" ploy. I've tried twice to sign up for one of the free plans, and both times, after receiving the registration/verification code to my email address, after entering the code I'm brought to a screen which offers me a choice of various paid services, with no way to get past that point in order to get a user name and password assigned without selecting one of these paid services first. Or if there is a way, they sure seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to find it.

If anyone can figure out a way to actually open and use one of the advertised free packages, feel free to correct me, but from what I can tell, if it isn't a pure bait and switch operation, it sure seems to come very close to it.

Edit: The only other alternative I see is a "live help" link. So perhaps they expect you to click on that link and talk "live" to a service representative in order to request the free account (which has already been requested), which allows them to technically avoid a "bait and switch" allegation. But as this seems intentionally set up in such a way as to discourage the opening of a free account, if it doesn't legally qualify as "bait and switch" it certainly seems "in the spirit" of it.

beq · 22 Oct 2007, 08:08 AM

I'm not sure how it had worked before (since Brinkster seems to change things around but forget to update parts of their website sometimes).

I just opened a free hosting account as a test, and didn't encounter any problems. It was quick and automated. Give them your email, receive the account registration code in a few seconds. Then choose your username and fill your your name/address info (or not), that's it. You can login to the control panel and set up your mailbox immediately.

Surprisingly though, they don't seem to bother provisioning the mailbox for free/paid accounts differently, at least right now.

Although the free hosting is advertised as having a 10MB webmail (@brinkster.net), I actually got a 500MB IMAP/POP3 Zimbra mailbox. That's pretty good for a free account -- and don't forget that the Zimbra web client also supports features such as custom header filtering (although other Zimbra features such as multiple identities and fetching of external accounts are unfortunately broken or disabled at Brinkster).

On the other hand, my paid Brinkster hosting is advertised as having 1GB mailboxes, but the @brinkster.net mailbox in this plan actually has the same 500MB space (only mailboxes in my domains get 1GB).

What's more, I found out that free hosting users get a limited-time discount offer to upgrade to a paid plan. I wish I'd started with the free account first so I could've paid less for my paid account

I'm glad I checked this out though, and I updated my post in the other thread.

xmailer · 22 Oct 2007, 08:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by beq

I'm not sure how it had worked before (since Brinkster seems to change things around but forget to update parts of their website sometimes).

I just opened a free hosting account as a test, and didn't encounter any problems. It was quick and automated. Give them your email, receive the account registration code in a few seconds. Then choose your username and fill your your name/address info (or not), that's it. You can login to the control panel and set up your mailbox immediately.

Okay, you didn't go into detail about one of the intermediate steps, but would I be correct in guessing that you clicked on the link in the registration code email message to open the full registration page? Because that's not what I did in my first two attempts this morning. In fact, after requesting the registration code, I left the web page from which I had done so open and, after receiving the code by email, I copied and pasted the code number from the email to the original page and manually entered my email address, and after submitting that info, I was not brought to a page to continue the registration, but rather, a page only offering me various paid web hosting and email services, as I said above.

But after reading your most recent post, I went back and opened the first of the two registration messages I had received this morning (both to the same email address) and right-clicked on the link in the email to open the link in a new window, which brought me to a page with my email address and the verification code already filled in for me, and this time when I submitted this information I was brought to a page with a full registration form to complete the registration of my free account. So although they seem to offer two slight variations on how to verify the registration code, it appears that only the one involving clicking directly on the link in the email may work as it should. So it appears that they may not yet have all their ducks in a row, as it were, with the way the registration process works. As you said, they may have forgotten to update things in full.

So apparently it isn't a "bait and switch" after all, although if they don't fix this little glitch in the alternative method of verifying the registraion code, I may likely not be the only one to get the impression that it is. Although I suppose it's also possible that they just fixed the problem sometime since I first tried to register quite a few hours ago now. Now I just have to try to think of a user name of four characters or more that I can live with, as my usual first choice of user name is my three-letter initials.

Anyway, thanks for the info and the follow-up. .

xmailer · 22 Oct 2007, 11:42 PM

Although I managed to open my brinkster account and set up my email account for it last night, I didn't have quite enough time at that time to look at the webmail interface at all. Now that I have, unfortunately as usual the Zimbra interface seems too "buggy" to be of much use to me. Although I was apparently able to add an alternate identity, and seemed to have the option to select this alternate identity in the From field of an outgoing message, as suggested above by beq, this function doesn't actually seem to be working properly, as the test message was received with my Brinkster.net address on the From line.

I also can't find any information about my email box quota at all, at least not from within the webmail interface itself. Although there is what appears to be a quota bar at the upper right corner of the screen, all it shows is the label "Quota:" with an "empty" white bar next to it (not surprisingly, since I don't yet have any email in it), but no information is shown there about my actual quota. But this may be related to the fact that the interface is very "sloppy" in general on my screen, with words/labels printed overlapping each other, some of them in fact even printed right "over" the "To" field in the message composition screen, for example, making it difficult to even see the address(es) I enter in that field. And trying to open the composition screen in a new window results in an empty window -- nothing in it at all.

So, along with being aggravatingly slow-loading, at least with my system and (preferred) screen settings, the interface is all but unusable to me, which has been more or less my usual experience with the Zimbra interface, to varying degrees, with every implementation of it which I've thus far tried. Hence it's actually one of my least favorite interfaces of all those I've tried in my entire time online for practical use. But if the email service itself proves reasonably stable and reliable (and my first test message sent from the webmail interface did reach its destination very quickly), it might serve me well as a POP3/SMTP and/or forwarding address. And if/when I may ever send mail from the webmail interface, it's nice to see that outgoing messages don't have a tagline.

nbarr · 23 Oct 2007, 01:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by xmailer

I also can't find any information about my email box quota at all, at least not from within the webmail interface itself. Although there is what appears to be a quota bar at the upper right corner of the screen, all it shows is the label "Quota:" with an "empty" white bar next to it (not surprisingly, since I don't yet have any email in it), but no information is shown there about my actual quota.

I have found that if I hold the mouse over the quota bar the quota (500mb in my case) shows up.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xmailer

So, along with being aggravatingly slow-loading, ...

I find Zimbra quite slow as well, both times I have tried it, at Brinkster and as well at privatemail.me.uk.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xmailer

it might serve me well as a POP3/SMTP and/or forwarding address.

I have found that IMAP works for Brinkster as well, using the same server settings as POP.

xmailer · 23 Oct 2007, 02:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nbarr

I have found that if I hold the mouse over the quota bar the quota (500mb in my case) shows up.

Thanks, I didn't think to try that. But I will -- if/when I can successfully login again, that is, as all I'm getting now is a blank page, save for the background color, even through three refreshes of the screen thus far, an experience I recall often having with Kaxy.com's Zimbra interface. Privatemail.me.uk I've never even been able to try, as I never even received the message I was supposed to receive apprising me of the opening of my account with the login details when I attempted to sign up there. As far as web interfaces go, some of these actually make Hotmail's (both the original and the current ones) look pretty good by comparison IMO.

beq · 23 Oct 2007, 07:38 AM

IIRC Zimbra has other skins that display textual quota information instead of a bar (so you don't have to mouse over it to get the stats, as nbarr mentioned), but I'm not sure if Brinkster has those skins.

The Zimbra web client has also been quite slow for me to load on slower computers (like my ultraportable laptop with ULV processor), on both IE and FF. Once it's loaded though it's usually decent for me, especially on faster computers and broadband (T1, cable, DSL, hybrid FTTH).

But even then, having HTML message composition pop up in a new window still takes awhile on my slow laptop. Likewise, showing message snippets takes a bit longer to load the mailbox view.

Like you, I've also had a couple of ocassions where the display is messed up (text overlapping once, but more commonly just having the mini-calendar that's supposed to be on the bottom left showing up on the top). They've been rare for me though, and a logout/login usually fixed it.

One reoccurring bug for me is that sometimes logging into a mailbox displays the skin from the previous mailbox I had logged out of instead of the correct skin for the current mailbox (I usually reuse the existing browser window, not sure if that's the cause).

Anyways, I agree that the Zimbra web interface isn't as polished as Yahoo Mail or the (Flash) Laszlo Mail for consumers, or as fast as, say Exchange's Outlook Web Access. But it also exposes a lot more features to the enduser. (Personally, when trying a new service I always consider how well it would work with Tuffmail

)

BTW I'm curious, do people also experience the same problems when trying Zimbra's own hosted demo:

http://www.zimbra.com/products/hosted_demo.php

It's the latest ZCS v5.0 beta though (officially scheduled for December), not v4.5.x.

21 Jul 2007, 12:51 PM	#1
ReuvenNY Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: New York Posts: 4,272	Any free Zimbra based email services? Someone mentioned a free Zimbra based email service based in the UK - http://mail.privatemail.me.uk/zimbra/mail I love the interface, but it's a small account (20 Mb I believe) and a complex domain to use - xxxx@privatemail.me.uk Anyone knows of other, larger free Zimbra accounts?

21 Jul 2007, 08:33 PM	#3
jdtaylor Master of the @ Join Date: Sep 2004 Posts: 1,712	Privatemail account size too small? You should be able to get an upgrade if you wish, just let the Privatemail admin know and they should be able to help you out.

22 Jul 2007, 08:11 PM	#5
King Of Email Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Nov 2005 Posts: 622	Kaxy There is always of course Kaxy.com. Kaxy is a Zimbra based free email service with "unlimited" storage. This service is widely advertised all over the internet as a free100MB email service, which it what it used to be before it went to the Zimbra interface. Original Kaxy account holders who did not login for a sufficient amount of time had their accounts erased when the new interface was initiated, so some formerly taken usernames may still be available. However, now for the bad news. Kaxy's Zimbra interface is extremely slow (when it works) and delays in messages sent and received can be unreasonably long. Since the last time I reviewed Kaxy's service, the Zimbra interface has been significantly simplified, representing either a newer or different version of the original interface. Unfortunately, this simplification has not improved the speed of inbox navigation which is the biggest problem with this service. If Kaxy is any representation of the overall performance of the Zimbra interface, then Zimbra can keep it. I don't have time to sit and wait while it does what most other webmail interfaces can do in a fraction of the time. Apparently the owners of Kaxy are concerned with the performance of the free email otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to retool the inbox. My only question is whether the poor performance lies with the host or is inherent in the Zimbra email application itself. Kaxy before Zimbra worked much faster and was much more reliable. At this point, I only monitor this service, not regularly use it or rely on it.

22 Jul 2007, 11:01 PM	#6
jdtaylor Master of the @ Join Date: Sep 2004 Posts: 1,712	I believe it could well be Zimbra, it runs slow everywhere else I have tried as well and may be an indication it needs a very fast server or something but at the moment if they are trying to run it on existing slow servers this may be the problem.

21 Oct 2007, 12:12 PM	#8
beq Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: USA Posts: 895	I haven't tried it myself, but I think Brinkster's free webhosting packages (longtime resource for budding web developers, with no ads) include a 10MB Zimbra mailbox? Can someone confirm? http://www.emaildiscussions.com/show...502#post433198

22 Oct 2007, 08:08 AM	#10
beq Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: USA Posts: 895	I'm not sure how it had worked before (since Brinkster seems to change things around but forget to update parts of their website sometimes). I just opened a free hosting account as a test, and didn't encounter any problems. It was quick and automated. Give them your email, receive the account registration code in a few seconds. Then choose your username and fill your your name/address info (or not), that's it. You can login to the control panel and set up your mailbox immediately. Surprisingly though, they don't seem to bother provisioning the mailbox for free/paid accounts differently, at least right now. Although the free hosting is advertised as having a 10MB webmail (@brinkster.net), I actually got a 500MB IMAP/POP3 Zimbra mailbox. That's pretty good for a free account -- and don't forget that the Zimbra web client also supports features such as custom header filtering (although other Zimbra features such as multiple identities and fetching of external accounts are unfortunately broken or disabled at Brinkster). On the other hand, my paid Brinkster hosting is advertised as having 1GB mailboxes, but the @brinkster.net mailbox in this plan actually has the same 500MB space (only mailboxes in my domains get 1GB). What's more, I found out that free hosting users get a limited-time discount offer to upgrade to a paid plan. I wish I'd started with the free account first so I could've paid less for my paid account I'm glad I checked this out though, and I updated my post in the other thread.

22 Oct 2007, 11:42 PM	#12
xmailer Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: USA Posts: 5,485	Although I managed to open my brinkster account and set up my email account for it last night, I didn't have quite enough time at that time to look at the webmail interface at all. Now that I have, unfortunately as usual the Zimbra interface seems too "buggy" to be of much use to me. Although I was apparently able to add an alternate identity, and seemed to have the option to select this alternate identity in the From field of an outgoing message, as suggested above by beq, this function doesn't actually seem to be working properly, as the test message was received with my Brinkster.net address on the From line. I also can't find any information about my email box quota at all, at least not from within the webmail interface itself. Although there is what appears to be a quota bar at the upper right corner of the screen, all it shows is the label "Quota:" with an "empty" white bar next to it (not surprisingly, since I don't yet have any email in it), but no information is shown there about my actual quota. But this may be related to the fact that the interface is very "sloppy" in general on my screen, with words/labels printed overlapping each other, some of them in fact even printed right "over" the "To" field in the message composition screen, for example, making it difficult to even see the address(es) I enter in that field. And trying to open the composition screen in a new window results in an empty window -- nothing in it at all. So, along with being aggravatingly slow-loading, at least with my system and (preferred) screen settings, the interface is all but unusable to me, which has been more or less my usual experience with the Zimbra interface, to varying degrees, with every implementation of it which I've thus far tried. Hence it's actually one of my least favorite interfaces of all those I've tried in my entire time online for practical use. But if the email service itself proves reasonably stable and reliable (and my first test message sent from the webmail interface did reach its destination very quickly), it might serve me well as a POP3/SMTP and/or forwarding address. And if/when I may ever send mail from the webmail interface, it's nice to see that outgoing messages don't have a tagline.

23 Oct 2007, 07:38 AM	#15
beq Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: USA Posts: 895	IIRC Zimbra has other skins that display textual quota information instead of a bar (so you don't have to mouse over it to get the stats, as nbarr mentioned), but I'm not sure if Brinkster has those skins. The Zimbra web client has also been quite slow for me to load on slower computers (like my ultraportable laptop with ULV processor), on both IE and FF. Once it's loaded though it's usually decent for me, especially on faster computers and broadband (T1, cable, DSL, hybrid FTTH). But even then, having HTML message composition pop up in a new window still takes awhile on my slow laptop. Likewise, showing message snippets takes a bit longer to load the mailbox view. Like you, I've also had a couple of ocassions where the display is messed up (text overlapping once, but more commonly just having the mini-calendar that's supposed to be on the bottom left showing up on the top). They've been rare for me though, and a logout/login usually fixed it. One reoccurring bug for me is that sometimes logging into a mailbox displays the skin from the previous mailbox I had logged out of instead of the correct skin for the current mailbox (I usually reuse the existing browser window, not sure if that's the cause). Anyways, I agree that the Zimbra web interface isn't as polished as Yahoo Mail or the (Flash) Laszlo Mail for consumers, or as fast as, say Exchange's Outlook Web Access. But it also exposes a lot more features to the enduser. (Personally, when trying a new service I always consider how well it would work with Tuffmail ) BTW I'm curious, do people also experience the same problems when trying Zimbra's own hosted demo: http://www.zimbra.com/products/hosted_demo.php It's the latest ZCS v5.0 beta though (officially scheduled for December), not v4.5.x.