Thoughts on Hosted Email Solutions

Zimbra sucks. There, I said it. It doesn’t fit my idea of what a good webmail system is. It is bloated, slow and unreliable (our provider couldn’t keep the server up). That’s my opinion, so don’t make any decisions before you use it yourself.

I’ve switched our company to a hosted Microsoft Exchange solution. Don’t get me wrong: the idea of relying on Microsoft for anything gets under my skin, but the hard truth is that Exchange is the best Collaboration software available. It goes beyond email including calendars, contacts, projects and the like — all with the potential of being shared across the system. What puts it over the top is the integration with Outlook and Entourage (think Outlook for Mac).

Personally I would never use this system. But I have to keep the needs of others in mind, specifically project managers, the marketing department, executives, et cetera. They’re all much more reliant on said features.

(For what it’s worth, we’re using AppRiver.)

The Joyent Connector Collaboration Suite looks promising — So much so that I’ve switched my SuperJared.com email to their platform.

But there are issues. Seriously, on the “production” version there are certain things that make it downright unusable for certain things.

Broken Things

• When viewing a message, you can click a person’s name to send an email to that person, except that it doesn’t pass the email address correctly.
• Next to the name is a plus sign so you can add that person to your contacts; This fails to pass the email address as well, but also won’t parse names with more than two names properly, e.g. “Lee Harvey Oswald” is only captured as “Lee Harvey”.
• Replying to messages causes HTML entities to show up in the textarea in which you write your message. I can deal with this, but many others would have no idea what’s going on.
• Viewed messages are placed between <pre> tags which causes two problems:
  • HTML messages usually have plenty of newlines in the code, just like any HTML page, however each newline is viewed as a page break, causing portions of the message that normally wouldn’t break to look terrible. Quite often the top of an HTML message is many lines down — You’d have to scroll just to get to the start of the email.
  • This one really gets under my nerves: text messages do not wrap unless wrapped by the sender’s client. You usually get one long line of text, requiring a horizontal scroll bar.

Missing Things

• You can’t invite someone to a calendar event; You can ‘notify’ them, but this doesn’t do anything for those not in your Connector Suite. This was the first deal-breaker when deciding not to go with this platform for Cuker Design.
• Server-side rules, although this one is supposedly coming soon. It can be tough to sort through vast amounts of email without rules, so this must be in place before I give anyone a solid recommendation.

Annoyances

• You can’t compose an email without going to the email tab first. There should be a rollover event (or something!) that is accessible from anywhere in the suite.
• Another part of the Connector is the Lists application which does exactly what you’d think it does. Unfortunately you can’t modify the lists without going to the list’s page first, even though you can view them from other parts of the Suite. This seems to be the desired effect, however when you have a list with a check box (think “To Do”), the check box is still shown in that “read-only” mode, giving the false impression that I can click the checkbox and have that change be saved.

This shouldn’t be considered a comprehensive list. These are issues I’ve come across in the last week or so using the platform, in the limited capacity that I do.

Despite these issues, I love the Joyent Connector Collaboration Suite, I just don’t feel it’s ready for prime-time. Having recently open-sourced it, Joyent took a step forward in making this the best damn system available, even if it is written using Ruby on Rails.