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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.
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