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Comment by ajbatac | Hacker News Reader

zimbra is great but it's not free for all unlike gmail.

So not true. The Community Edition is completely free and we use it at my company.

What do you not get with the CE? No Outlook connector, no Apple iSync plugin, no mobile BES plugin, and no ability to delegate the administration of specific domains to particular users. But for a plug-and-play solution, it's awesome. POP3, IMAP, LDAP, CalDav (including Free/Busy times extensions) work flawlessly. Uses Postfix for the SMTP so you can do lots of tricks behind the scene if necessary. Administration is a breeeze. My company migrated to Zimbra from our home-grown Qmail/CourierIMAP solution, and it's one of the best IT Infrastructure decisions we've ever made.

Also, No hot backups. For companies that need email without downtime this could be a deal breaker.

I administer the CE version at my work and it is a mostly no fuss package and was much better than the collaboration platform that we were using.

You could get around that by making a snapshot LV on Linux. Instant, point in time volume that you can now back up, then destroy later.

Is there a problem with restoring it if when you took a snapshot the database had unfinished transactions? I guess you just would not have the transactions written to disk and would lose whatever changes were being made.

Could there be a time where you take a snapshot when the database is writing the transactions to disk and corrupts the snapshots db? or is the LV smart enough to handle that?

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