Zarafa 6.20

Zarafa is an open-source email and groupware server for Linux that is designed to look and feel just like Windows Exchange Server.

Unlike similar products, however, Zarafa doesn’t just translate Microsoft’s messaging API (Mapi) – it replicates it on the Linux host, making the product almost indistinguishable from the real thing. At least as far as Outlook and other applications are concerned.

Although a lot cheaper than Exchange, the open-source Zarafa product isn’t necessarily free. While there is a free community implementation, that is limited to just three Outlook clients, otherwise you’ll need a commercial licence, priced by the number of users to be supported.

There’s also a fully functional, but time-limited, VM version, (created using Ubuntu Linux) for use with VMware, which we used for our evaluation.

On the plus side, because it’s written for Linux, Zarafa benefits from low start-up costs, with no need for an expensive Windows server. Indeed, for a small business all you need is an industry standard PC running a 32-bit or 64-bit Linux distro, including free platforms such as Debian and Ubuntu.

The software itself comprises several components such as the core mail server from Zarafa including the Mapi emulator (Mapi4Linux). In addition there are a number of standard open-source applications such as MySQL, for example, which is used to provide the message store, together with a choice of message transfer agents including Postfix and Sendmail.

It also makes use of Apache to support the web access client which is Ajax based and has a familiar Outlook feel to it.

At the client end, a small Mapi provider needs to be installed for Outlook to work with the product, but this can be used with any version from Outlook 2000 onwards. Once configured it’s possible to use Outlook in much the same way as with Exchange, for example to share folders, schedule meetings and so on.

The groupware features can also be accessed from the web client, with ordinary messaging support available for other Pop3/Imap clients plus iCal compatibility for calendaring tools that support this protocol.

We had no real problems getting Zarafa to work and it really does provide a lot of functionality for much less than a comparable Exchange Server. The web client is responsive and easy to use and there’s support too for mobile email with a Z-push tool to push messages out to Windows mobile devices.

There is also built-in Blackberry support if you opt for the Professional edition (from around £26 per user – minimum 20 users). Another useful feature is an enhanced backup tool in the latest 6.20 version, able to recover individual mailboxes rather than the whole message store when things go wrong.

However, it’s not all good news. There are no built-in tools to filter spam or screen messages for viruses. Management could also be an issue, with no graphical interface available to add or manage users, set quotas or tweak other server-side settings.

Active Directory integration helps here and, to be fair, the lack of a GUI is unlikely to be a problem in large organisations used to managing Linux applications from the command line.

Small businesses with limited expertise, however, are probably better off looking at friendlier alternatives, such as Kerio’s KMS which can be run on either Linux or Windows, or the Windows-only MDaemon product.