toil.jpgAs you know, Untangle is in the business of providing great, easy-to-use software apps to small business – often for free.

And what’s the #1 “killer app” of small business? Email! And many small businesses want to run their own infrastructures – they just aren’t ready for the cloud.

So we are very motivated to provide our users with capable, and ideally free and open, email tools. We eat our own dogfood (our internal Untangle Server is called “dogfood”!), so we’d use it too.

Yet Untangle is moving back to Exchange for internal use, and we have so far stayed away from offering email and calendaring software to our users. Indeed, we have no Exchange/Outlook competitor on the shelves of our web store.

Why is that?

Mainly because finding a simple, affordable solution has been too damn hard – especially if you want to stick with open source (we do)! After decades of effort trying to imitate or better Exchange/Outlook, our industry continues to fall short of the mark.

To see why, lets start with the requirements….

Here’s what’s needed for a competitive email/collaboration app:

  • Easy stuff
    • Must support (at least) IMAP
    • Must be multi-platform (Win/Mac/Linux)
    • Must have calendaring
    • Must have web client
    • Must support Outlook
  • Somewhat difficult stuff
    • Must have calendar integrated with email
    • Must have group calendaring, with conflict resolution support
    • Must have address book integrated with calendar and email
  • Difficult stuff
    • Must work well with Outlook plug-ins (e.g., Salesforce)
    • Must support mobile use (Blackberry/iPhone/Win Mobile/Palm)
    • Must be scalable
    • Must be reliable

In the free/open-source world, pickings are slim on the mail side. The options range from imapd to Panda to Dovecot. All are decent tools, but they are mainly standalone and lack enough integration to meet our spec.

Moving to calendaring, relevant open-source projects even tougher to find. There’s basically PHProjekt and its variants. And we’re not the only folks having trouble finding solutions, as evidenced by this post on Hanno’s Blog.

So far, all point products. Focusing now on integrated collaboration tools, we find offerings from Zimbra, IP Brick, and Unison. But closer inspection shows that the latter two are neither open nor free.

So the package that comes closest to meeting the requirements is Zimbra Open Source Edition. But to hit all specs, you must buy their commercial package. Expensive, but less so than Exchange. So Untangle purchased Zimbra Professional, and we contemplated offering Zimbra to our customers.

But there’s been one not-so-small problem with our Zimbra installation. Since about the time of the Yahoo! acquisition, we have noticed more and more things break. This is especially true around their connectors, which are key to their interoperability. Untangle’s business runs on Salesforce, and the majority of our client machines are Unix-based (Linux and Mac OS X). The connectors are key for us!

So after looking at all the alternatives that I mentioned above, we are (sadly and reluctantly) moving to MS Exchange.

Meanwhile, we are analyzing how we can develop our own open, free, and integrated solution…stay tuned!