Yahoo goes offline with Zimbra

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 28 Jul 2008 at 10:36

Yahoo has launched a new desktop application for offline emailing, as its acquisition of Zimbra begins to pay off.

Yahoo's Zimbra Desktop edition claims to provide offline emailing for popular webmail services including GMail. It also offers a word processor, spreadsheet and task manager and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Although continuous internet connections are now possible thanks to Wi-Fi and 3G, offline email is still an attractive proposition for many, and one which both Google and Yahoo have been working on.

Prior to the Yahoo acquisition, Zimbra worked with Mozilla on providing offline access to email in Firefox 3. Engineers developed code that allowed users to save emails to a draft folder when offline, for sending when a connection is available.

"Switching between multiple email accounts is one of the communication headaches that users encounter on a daily basis," says Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder. "With Yahoo Zimbra Desktop, we have taken our world-class collaboration suite and made it available for everyone for use anywhere, anytime, with any email account."

Despite claiming to work offline with Google's Gmail, we were unable to setup our account with the new software.