Re: [Evolution] Zimbra and Evolution

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 11:44 -0400, Jennifer Weltz wrote:
> To give more detail.  We are an office of 6 people - all using
> Evolution 2.8.2 in SUSE Linux.  We upgraded to this version of
> Evolution last year and it has had a lot of stability problems and
> can't hot Sync easily.  We have been using different versions of
> Evolution since 2003 and so have a huge amount of data.

2.8.2 is pretty old. The latest version is 2.22.3.

> We were looking for a system that would give us an Exchange-like
> environment and were recommended to use Zimbra.  Our tech person is
> now establishing a Zimbra Server in our office to give us the ability
> to share calendars and contacts as well as use our I-phones and Treos
> without having to re-file our e-mails when we come into the office as
> we all work remotely quite bit from Windows based evironments at home
> as well.
>
> We are now upgrading to Ubuntu with Evo 2.22.2 and with an on-site
> Zimbra server.  This is all new to us, but our biggest concern is that
> we would lose our folders and filters that we have spent many hours
> setting up in Evolution when making the change.   Since we have had a
> bad year with Evolution, we are inclined to move away from it entirely
> and I admit to not fully understanding the advantage to keeping
> Evolution on our desktops.

You can keep using Evo but with your Zimbra server, un IMAP mode. You
won't get all the Zimbra web goodies, but the basic mail funcionality
should work fine.

> Wouldn't this mean that if we access our Zimbra server from home, we
> would not have all of our e-mail data and filters?  If so, this is not
> for us.  If so, how does that work?

Where is your mail currently stored? There are 2 basic possibilities:

1) Each user downloads his/her mail and keeps it on a local PC. In this
case your server is probably POP-based.

2) Each users accesses a central mail store, and can see their mail from
anywhere. Your server is either IMAP or Groupwise or Exchange.

In any case you can check from within Evolution by opening
Edit->Preferences-<account-name>Receiving Mail and looking at the Server
Type box.

If the server is type (1) then the easiest way to transfer your mails is
to set up Zimbra, configure it in Evolution as an IMAP server, then
simply drag and drop messages from the old account to the new one.

If it's type (2) you can so the same thing, but there are better ways
(the problem with dragging and dropping is that it will change some of
the date headers on the messages).

The Zimbra docs have specific information on importing mailboxes from
Outlook, Exchange and Lotus Domino.

Any or all of these may be useful in converting your folders, depending
on your setup. Rest assured that there is no need to lose your existing
mail.

OTOH converting your Evolution filters is I'm afraid going to be
painful. There's no automatic way of doing it that I know of, so each
user is going to have to note down the filters they care about, then
recreate them under Zimbra. The only way to avoid this is by staying
with Evo as your mail application (see above).

poc