Free Zimbra Desktop – Access all your Email Offline

The free Zimbra Desktop is an email client unveiled by Yahoo a few months back. It essentially behaves like a clone of Microsoft Outlook by providing offline access to all your mail in Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail  and all other email providers. But that is not all, if you are using Yahoo mail or Gmail, Zimbra Desktop syncs with your calendar, contacts, tasks  and documents associated with your email id.

Zimbra Desktop Email interface

Features of Free Zimbra Desktop

• It works online and offline. The messages you type and send while offline are stored in your outbox.
• Works with any email service  which provides POP and IMAP access.  Yahoo Zimbra Desktop works flawlessly with Yahoo mail, Gmail, AOL, Outlook and Hotmail.
• Cross platform. Runs in Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
• Follow emails as conversations and threads instead of the flat structure.
• Makes use of tags just like in Gmail to bookmark emails.
• A powerful search feature which allows you to search for your emails.
• A comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts, and
• Keep track of your calendar events, tasks and appointments. It even syncs these with your Yahoo or Google account.

These are  just a few of the broad set of features that the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop provides.

At present, the free Yahoo Zimbra Desktop is still in beta. But having used it for quite some time now for managing my Yahoo and Gmail accounts, I am very much impressed by its features. It has surged ahead of Outlook email client quality wise  by leaps and bounds. Yes it is quite slow to start initially. But once it is up and running, it resides minimized to your Taskbar checking all your email accounts for new incoming mails.

Configuring Free Zimbra Desktop

Once you have downloaded and installed Zimbra Desktop on your machine running either Windows, Linux or Mac OSX, double click on the icon to start the Zimbra Desktop. The first time it starts, you will be prompted to configure it  for your email service provider.

The following are the brief steps I had to follow prior to start using Zimbra Desktop to keep track of and manage all my email accounts.

1. Click "Add New Account" button.

2. Choose an Email provider from the drop down menu.

3. Enter your email account information.

4. Loading the user interface.

You can set up multiple email accounts

Keyboard Shortcuts for Yahoo Zimbra Desktop

Yahoo Zimbra Desktop has a nice set of keyboard shortcuts built-in. These help a user in navigating in between different mail accounts and sift through the mail. You can access the shortcuts tab by clicking on the “Options > Shortcuts“  tabs in the email client interface.

Keyboard shortcuts used in Zimbra

Yahoo Zimbra Desktop is a fabulous software which helps you manage multiple email accounts from diverse hosts. It provides a rich interface which is very user friendly.  Even though it is still in beta, this software can enhance your productivity by efficiently managing all your emails right from your desktop. A more enticing fact is that you can manage (read & compose) your emails while offline. After working in it, I have no doubt in my mind that we can look forward to a robust email client and organizer in the free Zimbra Desktop.

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