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+Couple of thoughts on Zarafa
+############################
+
+:tags: Fedora, ourcloud, wordpress
+:date: 2013-10-04T16:02:07
+:category: computer
+
+
+I have mentioned in one internal email discussion (yes, on the fabled
+memo-list) that I have my emails in Zarafa run by me on my own server
+down in the living room. And one of my colleagues asked me for some
+comments on IRC. After we have chatted for a moment, I thought it might
+be nice to have these comments collected and published as my record of
+the real experience with the life outside of the Cloud.
+
+First of all my colleague asked me about my experience with the biggest
+danger of self-hosting, downtime and possible data loss.  I have to
+admit that this is a place where I cheat a bit. MX records for my domain
+are pointed towards hosted server of my relatives’ company. Messages are
+then pulled down via fetchmail (yes, I know there are better options for
+fetching mail, but so far fetchmail seems to do the job right). Yes,
+I don’t have UPS and only backup I do is to rsync key information to the
+other computer in the home LAN (I am still ignoring TWiT ads claiming
+that there must be one copy of backups off site … yes, they are right,
+but I am afraid it would be quite expensive both in terms of required
+bandwidth, which is not free here, and price of the service).
+
+The second obvious problem of self-hosting email is dealing with spam.
+I use dspam_ from Fedora EPEL 6 packages, but I am actually looking for
+something much more simple. Configuration of dspam is pretty tough thing
+to do and apparently I haven’t done it correctly, for example the admin
+inerface doesn’t work. I think it is time to switch to something more
+Unixy, simple standard tools for doing simple things. In this case I am
+thinking about going back to procmail and per-user bogofilter, but
+I haven’t enough time and courage to do it yet.  
+
+**Update later:** So, I’ve got rid of the dspam, and with help of
+trivial (mostly out of the manpage) procmailrc and this `trivial Python
+script`_ (yes, the name of the repository is wrong) I have hacked
+together the three-folder system which works pretty well.
+
+.. _dspam:
+    https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/dspam
+.. _`trivial Python script`:
+    https://gitlab.com/mcepl/dspam-folder-training/blob/master/train_bogofilter
+
+But, these are just tools around the central server, which is in my case
+Zarafa_. Well, Zarafa.  There is a good news and bad news about Zarafa.
+The good news is that it actually really works. It serves for me as
+IMAP, CalDAV, ActiveSync server, taking care of my emails, calendars,
+and contacts. It works flawlessly with Thunderbird/Lightning combo (no
+Contacts though), my wife’s Android phone (together with CalDAV-Sync_,
+Tasks_, and ActiveSync it serves emails, calendars, contacts, and even
+todo list), and for my Firefox OS (for emails and calendars with native
+apps, unfortunately I haven’t found a good CardDAV support and all ToDo
+apps suck, so far). That’s the good news. Bad news is that Zarafa is
+AFAIK the **only** FLOSS application I know about which provides so
+complete service.
+
+.. _Zarafa: https://community.zarafa.com/
+.. _CalDAV-Sync:
+    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.caldav.lib
+.. _Tasks:
+    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.tasks
+
+It is not a crazy memory hog as I was afraid of C++/PHP/MySQL
+application.  Configuration is a bit complicated and some parts have to
+be done using own scripts or third party applications (e.g., there is no
+anti spam bundled, support for CardDAV is community provided and
+unfinished hack, backup), but I guess some of these are better provided
+in the paid-for enterprise version (I use pure FLOSS packages from EPEL
+6; do you notice the pattern?). FLOSS version doesn’t allow calendar
+sharing (that’s only for enterprise version, which seems to me too much
+crippleware … why I cannot share my calendar with my wife?).
+
+Also, I have a huge problem with storing all my emails in some
+proprietary database storage. Both because of proprietary (meaning,
+non-standard) and database. Emails should in my opinion be stored in
+mbox/Maildir/MH storage and database should be used only for indexing of
+such store.
+
+I understand that Zarfa is a commercial enterprise and they need to make
+money for their salaries (and I am grateful they provide so much
+software as a free software), but it seems to me generally, their goals
+and mine are a bit different. I would like the best possible
+mail/calendar/contacts/task server using only open standards (BTW,
+I don’t like that the only way how to access contacts is via
+ActiveSync). Zarafa as a company has obviously as the biggest goal to be
+cheap/open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange and it seems to me
+that people like me are just accidental beneficiaries of this other
+project.
+
+I would love to be able to replace Zarafa with truly free and
+open-standard based alternative. Dovecot would probably do as a email
+server, there are some webmails, but I don’t know about **well** working
+and **stable** CalDAV/CardDAV server (and Thunderbird sucks as a CardDAV
+client). I may try DaviCAL one of those days, but it still seems to me
+hacky and too large for solely a family server (Zimbra is completely out
+of my league with its hardware and other requirements).
+
+Also, webmail. It is quite popular application these days, so it must be
+said, that the Zarafa ones sucks. Both old one (the only one which has
+been packaged for EPEL 6) and which is an attempt to create 100%
+faithful bug-by-bug compatible copy of some ancient version of the
+Outlook Web Access. There is also a new more Web 2.0 like version of the
+webmail, but it has not been packaged in the Fedora yet (there are some
+problems with some Flash files or something), so I have to use upstream
+packages (which are kindly provided for all versions of RHEL, true).
+Also the new version seems to be a bit slow and I cannot say I would be
+keen on having it as my day-to-day client. On the other hand, it
+certainly gets job done when one is outside of the real computer, which
+I think is the most important role of webmail anyway.