Zimbra’s Mobile Phone interface on an iPhone
After complaining that the IT Department has more important things to do than upgrade our Zimbra 
installation, I am forced to eat my words.
It was updated this morning, and the new features (see Zimbra’s press release ) are just as sweet as they promised to be (Thanks, Mark. You IT guys are the cat’s pajamas.)
I no longer have to dive into Firefox to use its web interface, and it does feel blisteringly fast in Safari 3.0.
Dialling up the Zimbra 5.0 web interface in Safari on the iPhone now automatically launches its “mobile” interface. It looks good:
It lets you select emails by folder, via Zimbra’s saved searches or by tag. In a nice touch for MailTags users, you can set a Zimbra filter which will pick up a particular plain-text MailTags tag in the x-mailtags header and label it with a corresponding Zimbra tag.
The only downside I can find is no auto-completion of email addresses, which is a pain if you need to compose a new email or forward an existing one.
The calendar on the iPhone is even better than the built-in one.
It respects the colour choices of each calendar so that it is easier at a glance to see if the event is home-related (blue) or work-related (green). In iPhone’s default calendar everything is steely-blue. Stylish but not as informative.
No auto-completion puts iPhone’s mail client ahead for email, but Zimbra’s calendar is now my first port of call for seeing what’s coming up next.
[Hawk Wings readers who are unfamiliar with Zimbra's power, reliability and general open-source goodness can read about it on Zimbra's Product Page .]
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January 21st, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Should ‘ra’ come after ‘Telst’ in the top right part of the screen. If so, how’d you manage that?
January 21st, 2008 at 2:45 pm
It’s not as exciting as it sounds ;-)
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:04 am
What’s more exciting than an Australian iPhone?
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:50 pm
There is no way that I can get MailTags to sync with Zimbra tags. How did you manage that? I use Leopard and the latest beta of MailTags and Zimbra 5.0.1.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:04 pm
@Peter, “sync” is a strong word. I can at least get Zimbra to recognize MailTags projects and keywords (which need to be set in the Preferences to plain text) in its mail filters. Zimbra doesn’t seem to use headers for its tags, so it can’t be a two-way process.
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Tim, in the latest beta (2.2 public beta 4) of MailTags I cannot choose ‘plain text’ for keywords and projects, but the message source shows a header line
X-Keywords: todo
(todo is one of my predefined keywords). I use a rule in Zimbra that says that if the header named ‘x-keywords’ contains ‘todo’ then the message should be tagged with a Zimbra tag. But this never happens.
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:54 pm
You’re right that option has gone!
Although my emails still contain an X-MailTags header with info like this in it:
X-Mailtags: { “mailTagsProject” : ["Hawk Wings"]}
I wonder how that happened. Perhaps you should post over in Scott’s forums — http://forums.indev.ca/
January 24th, 2008 at 6:41 am
@Peter @Tim
In the latest version I am going clear text only — the other was a simple base 64 encoding of a serialized object — (it wasn’t encrypted)
Clear text makes more sense — using a json structure and allows other clients to read it easier (and make rules better)
For example it is better to have a rule
if x-MailTags header contains aProjectName
Than
if x-MailTags header contains f8ul43isa==sdfese (encoding of aProjectName)
:)
As for Zimbra syncing — unfortunately it is not a two way street — an a bit of a kludge.
January 24th, 2008 at 6:41 am
@Peter @Tim
In the latest version I am going clear text only — the other was a simple base 64 encoding of a serialized object — (it wasn’t encrypted)
Clear text makes more sense — using a json structure and allows other clients to read it easier (and make rules better)
For example it is better to have a rule
if x-MailTags header contains aProjectName
Than
if x-MailTags header contains f8ul43isa==sdfese (encoding of aProjectName)
:)
As for Zimbra syncing — unfortunately it is not a two way street — and a bit of a kludge.