Zimbra Collaboration, formerly known as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) before 2019, is a

collaborative software Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them." Regar ...

suite that includes an email server and a web client. Zimbra was initially developed by LiquidSys, which changed their name to Zimbra, Inc. on 26 July 2005. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite was first released in 2005. The company was subsequently purchased by

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

on September 17, 2007, and later sold to VMware on January 12, 2010. In July 2013, it was sold by VMware to Telligent Systems which changed its name to Zimbra, Inc. in September 2013. It was then acquired by Synacor on 18 August 2015. According to former Zimbra President and CTO Scott Dietzen, the name for Zimbra is derived from the song " I Zimbra" by

Talking Heads Talking Heads were an American Rock music, rock band formed in New York City in 1975.Talking Heads

Edition

The software consists of both client and server components, and at one time also offered a desktop email client, called Zimbra Desktop. Two versions of Zimbra are available: an open-source version, and a commercially supported version ("Network Edition") with closed-source components such as a proprietary Messaging Application Programming Interface connector to Outlook for calendar and contact synchronization. The now discontinued Zimbra Desktop was a full-featured free desktop email client. Development was discontinued under VMware's stewardship in 2013 but was restarted in February 2014, but was ended again by 2019. The web client featured an HTML5 offline mode starting with version 8.5. The Zimbra Web Client is a full-featured collaboration suite that supports email and group calendars. At one time it featured document-sharing using an Ajax web interface that enabled tool tips, drag-and-drop items, and right-click menus in the UI. Today it has document sharing, chat, and videoconferencing. Also included are advanced searching capabilities and date relations, online document authoring, "Zimlet" mashups, and a full administration UI. It is written using the ''Zimbra Ajax Toolkit.'' The Zimbra Server uses several open source projects (see the section, '' Included open source projects''). It exposes a

SOAP Soap is a salt (chemistry), salt of a fatty acid (sometimes other carboxylic acids) used for cleaning and lubricating products as well as other applications. In a domestic setting, soaps, specifically "toilet soaps", are surfactants usually u ...

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

to all its functionality and is also an IMAP and POP3 server. The server runs on many

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s. On other, non-Linux operating systems it can be run using a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

and using container technology. It supports CalDAV, CardDAV and SMTP for messaging, LDAP for directory services, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD). Zimbra uses Postfix for its MTA functionality. It includes technology from ClamAV, SpamAssassin and DSPAM for anti-malware features and S/MIME for email signing and encryption. OS X Server support was dropped with version ZCS 7.0. Zimbra can synchronize mail, contacts, and calendar items with open-source mail clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird and

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and also with proprietary clients such as

Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft 365 software suites. Primarily popular as an email client for businesses, Outlook also includes functions such as Calendari ...

and Apple Mail, either through proprietary connectors or using the ActiveSync protocol, both available exclusively in the commercially supported version. Zimbra also provides native two-way sync to many mobile devices.

2024 Cyber Attack

In 2024, Zimbra was hit by a significant cyber attack due to a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability, labeled CVE-2024-45519. The flaw in Zimbra’s postjournal service allowed attackers to send specially crafted emails, enabling remote command execution on affected systems. While the postjournal service isn’t active by default, its use in many setups made Zimbra an attractive target, especially since some instances lacked up-to-date security patches. To mitigate these risks, Zimbra released patches for affected versions, including updates to 9.0.0, 10.0.9, and others.

Software license

The closed source variant Network edition is distributed under the Zimbra Network Edition EULA. Starting with version 8.5 the Zimbra source code is available under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

version 2 (backend) and the Common Public Attribution License version 1 (frontend). Previous versions were released under the Zimbra Public License (ZPL). The

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

accepts the license as being a free software license and refers to it as being identical to the Yahoo! Public License with the exception that Zimbra, Inc. provides the license, rather than Yahoo!.

Included open source projects

The Zimbra Server uses open source projects such as: * Postfix * MariaDB (since version 8.5) * OpenDKIM (since version 8.0) * OpenLDAP * Jetty (since version 5) * Lucene * ClamAV * SpamAssassin * Amavis (amavisd-new) * DSPAM
deprecated
starting 8.7) * Aspell * nginx (since 5.0) * ØMQ (since 8.0) It previously used: *

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

(last used in version 8.0) * Apache Tomcat (last used in version 4.5) *Perdition mail retrieval proxy (until 4.5)

References

External links